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WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS 



WHO ARE 
THE UNITARIANS? 

BY 

AUGUSTUS P. RECCORD 

Eight sermons delivered at the request of and 
published by the Board of Trustees of the 
First Unitarian Church of Detroit, Michigan. 




THE BEACON PRESS 

25 Beacon Street 
BOSTON, - - - MASS. 



Copyright, 1920 
By THE BEACON PRESS 



All rights reserved 



NOV -8 1920 
g)C!.A60l500 



I 



PREFACE 



The exclusion from the Interchurch 
World Movement of the Unitarian churches, 
in common with the Universalist, has 
prompted the question, "Who are these 
Unitarians? What is their origin and his- 
tory and belief that they should not be per- 
mitted to participate in one of the most 
ambitious religious movements of today?" 
The admission that the exclusion was based 
upon policy rather than upon principle, upon 
expediency rather than upon conviction, has 
not lessened the popular interest in the above 
questions. The sermons included in this 
little volume are an attempt to give a partial 
answer. They were delivered at the request 
of the Board of Trustees of the First Uni- 
tarian Church of Detroit, Michigan, and are 
published by that same board, with the hope 
and expectation that they will be welcomed 
by thoughtful, broadminded people in all 
denominations. While it is impossible for 



PREFACE 

any one person, whether minister or layman, 
to commit the entire Unitarian fellowship, it 
is believed that these sermons express, with 
reasonable accuracy, the consensus of opin- 
ion among an increasing number of Uni- 
tarians. 

Augustus P. Reccord. 



Detroit, Michigan, 
May, 1920. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PAG* 

Introduction: The Unitarian Movement . 1 
What Unitarians Believe 



I God 17 

II Jesus 33 

III The Holy Spirit 53 

IV The Bible .69 

V Prayer 83 

VI Salvation .99 

VII The Future Life 115 



Conclusion: Are Unitarians Evangelical? . 130 



Where the spirit of the Lord is, 
there is liberty. 

2 Corinthians III, 17. 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



INTRODUCTION 
THE UNITARIAN MOVEMENT 
S an organized movement Unitarianism 



mind toward the things of the spirit it is as 
old as Christianity itself. It commends it- 
self to the thoughtful, not as a body of doc- 
trine, but as a method of apprehending re- 
ligious truth, the method of free and unfet- 
tered observation and reflection. Over the 
door of every Unitarian church might be in- 
scribed the words of Isaiah, "This is the way, 
walk ye in it." 

It is sometimes claimed that the church of 
the first two or three centuries was Unitar- 
ian. It was Unitarian only in the sense 
that it was not Trinitarian. The doctrine of 
the Trinity had not yet been formulated. 
Many of the teachings of the church were as 




As an attitude of 



[i] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



far removed from our conceptions of reli- 
gious truth as from the strictest orthodoxy. 
The chief thing that we have in common 
with it is the right of private judgment in 
matters of belief or conduct. Gradually 
this right was wrested from the people by the 
steady encroachment of the growing Cath- 
olic church until not a vestige of it remained. 
For the devout believer, the decrees of the 
church usurped the place of both reason and 
conscience. The reformers of the sixteenth 
century threw off one yoke only to assume 
another. They emancipated themselves 
from bondage to the church but substituted 
for it an equally oppressive bondage to the 
letter of the Bible. Unitarians, through- 
out their history, have refused to recognize 
these or any other purely external authori- 
ties in morals or religion. They have asked, 
with Jesus, "Why, even of yourselves, judge 
ye not what is right?" And so whoever, 
throughout the ages, has dared to raise his 
voice in protest against the authority of a 
divinely instituted church or a divinely in- 
spired book and in the interest of the di- 

[2] 



INTRODUCTION 



vinely given reason and conscience, may be 
regarded as the spiritual forerunner of the 
Unitarian movement. 

It was not until a century ago that this 
movement took definite form here in Amer- 
ica. At the beginning of the century which 
brought the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth, 
English Unitarianism was confined to cer- 
tain individual thinkers who were hated and 
persecuted by Catholic and Protestant alike. 
One could hardly expect to find many traces 
of Unitarian thought among the founders of 
New England and yet, in spite of their rigid 
Calvinism, they brought with them the 
germs, at least, of a larger and more humane 
theology. They craved simplicity, and this 
led them to omit all creed tests from their 
church covenants. They loved liberty, reli- 
gious as well as political, and while they 
acknowledged their dependence upon the 
Bible, they insisted upon their right to use 
their reason in its interpretation. It has 
been well said that "In the broad and pro- 
phetic spirit of John Robinson, in the in- 
tense love of liberty of Sir Harry Vane, in 

[3] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



the sturdy sense and rational judgments of 
John Winthrop, ... in the fidelity to toler- 
ation of Roger Williams and his keen insight 
into the meaning of soul liberty, what is now 
called Unitarianism had its beginnings." 

Two events hastened the birth of Ameri- 
can Unitarianism as an organized movement. 
One was the adoption of the half-way cove- 
nant; the other was the Great Awakening. 
Previous to 1662 only church members were 
allowed to vote in civil affairs. This meant 
the disfranchisement of five-sixths of the peo- 
ple and provoked bitter complaint. The 
half-way covenant was an attempt to allay 
the discontent of the disfranchised. It 
sought to counteract the growing disinclina- 
tion to become members of the church by 
making the conditions easier. It set aside 
the idea of a converted membership and ad- 
mitted all who had been baptized in infancy, 
were of good moral character and did not 
openly deny the teachings of the church. 
Such membership conveyed the right to vote 
in affairs of state but not in affairs of the 
church. The result was the admission of 

[4] 



INTRODUCTION 



many who had not experienced conversion 
and had little sympathy with the doctrinal 
position of the church. The presence of 
these half-way members was viewed with sus- 
picion. It seemed to cast discredit upon the 
essential character of conversion. In 1735 
Jonathan Edwards, then minister of the 
Northampton church, inaugurated a revival. 
Later his efforts were reenforced by the 
arrival of the English evangelist, Whitefield. 
The churches were aroused from their 
lethargy, the half-way covenant was abol- 
ished, and a converted church membership 
restored. 

The Unitarians of today are the spiritual 
descendants of those who refused to be 
"awakened." At first they were not known 
by this name. They constituted the liberal 
wing of the Congregationalist body. The 
situation was not unlike that in the Congre- 
gationalist church today. Had the same 
spirit of toleration prevailed then that pre- 
vails today there would have been no divi- 
sion. If the same spirit of intolerance pre- 
vailed today there would be another break. 

[5] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



Tolerance, however, was not characteristic of 
that day. The conservative ministers pre- 
cipitated the crisis by refusing to exchange 
pulpits with their more liberal brethren. In 
1805 they were filled with consternation by 
the appointment of Henry Ware, a man of 
Unitarian convictions, to the Hollis profes- 
sorship at Harvard College. This made him 
the moral and religious instructor of the stu- 
dent body and demonstrated that the college 
was in the hands of the representatives of 
the new faith. Andover Seminary was 
founded at once to counteract the growing 
tendency toward liberalism. One hundred 
years later, almost to a day, this Seminary 
was moved to Cambridge and affiliated with 
the Harvard Divinity School as coordinate 
parts of the University. 

At first the liberal leaders met this out- 
break of fanatical opposition with silence. 
They were disinclined to controversy and 
dreaded a division in the Congregational 
body. But as the breach between the two 
wings became wider and the relations be- 
tween them more strained they were forced 

[6] 



INTRODUCTION 



to the conclusion that such a division was 
inevitable. Disfellowshipped by their bro- 
ther ministers and denounced from the more 
conservative pulpits, they felt constrained to 
speak. They found a spokesman in Wil- 
liam EUery Channing, then minister of the 
Federal Street church in Boston. In 1819 
he was invited to preach the sermon at the 
ordination of Jared Sparks, in Baltimore. 
Taking as his subject "Unitarian Christian- 
ity," he contended for a rational interpreta- 
tion of the Bible as a human document, 
written by men and for men, and subject to 
the ordinary methods of interpretation. He 
then stated the views to which such an inter- 
pretation must inevitably lead, the unity and 
moral perfection of God, the humanity and 
spiritual leadership of Jesus and the dignity 
and worth of human nature. Ultimately 
these came to be known as the three great 
affirmations of Channing Unitarianism. 

The die was cast. Henceforth there could 
be no concealment or evasion. Lines were 
sharply drawn and ministers and churches 
were compelled to take sides. As one 

[7] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



church after another issued its declaration of 
faith, it was found that more than one hun- 
dred and twenty-five New England churches, 
among them the oldest and strongest, had 
declared for the new faith. A glance at the 
Unitarian Year Book will reveal the fact 
that the old first churches of Plymouth, Bos- 
ton, Cambridge, Dorchester, Roxbury, Con- 
cord, Lexington, Salem and twenty-six other 
Massachusetts communities, all founded in 
the seventeenth century, are now Unitarian. 
The Berry Street Conference of Ministers 
was formed in 1820, and the Christian Regis- 
ter founded in 1821. There organization 
lingered. The adherents of the new faith 
shrank from the thought of founding another 
denomination. They preferred to think of 
themselves as an " unsectarian sect," hesi- 
tated to take the Unitarian name, and re- 
garded themselves as the representatives of a 
religious movement rather than a religious 
body. But there can be no movement un- 
less there is something to move. Organiza- 
tion does not mean necessarily stagnation 
and inertia. And so in 1825 the American 

[8] 



INTRODUCTION 



Unitarian Association was formed and or- 
ganized Unitarianism was born. 

The Association's initial task was one of 
the most difficult and perplexing that any 
group of religionists ever faced. It was that 
of organizing liberty so as to make it effec- 
tive. Otherwise the churches of the new 
order were destined to remain but little more 
than a group of "jostling independencies." 
The task is not yet complete. For conveni- 
ence we can divide the first century of the 
denominational history into three periods. 
The first was one of affirmation and denial, 
affirmation of the new faith and denial of 
the old. It was dominated by William 
Ellery Charming. Once grant his three 
great affirmations and then demand that all 
theological doctrines and religious beliefs be 
thrown into the arena and judged by their 
conformity to these great principles, and, no 
matter how tenaciously the old dogmas cling 
to their places, the door is thrown wide open 
for a religion purified from superstition and 
undefiled by dogma. It was Channing's 
mission to open this door. 

[9] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 

The second period was one of emancipa- 
tion. It was dominated by Theodore Parker 
and Ralph Waldo Emerson. There are still 
those who pride themselves upon being 
Channing Unitarians, who believe as Chan- 
ning did a century ago, not as he would be- 
lieve if he were here today. The same type 
existed then. From the beginning the new 
faith tended to become stereotyped. It be- 
gan to acquire that rigidity of form against 
which Channing uttered his warning and 
which he characterized as "Unitarian Or- 
thodoxy." Parker and Emerson, each in his 
own way, stripped off the shell which was 
gradually encasing the new faith and de- 
stroyed the last vestige of the old super- 
naturalism. They freed religion from its 
accidental character and grounded it in the 
moral and spiritual nature of man. Emer- 
son sounded the key note of the impending 
change in his Divinity School Address, de- 
livered in 1838. Three years later Parker's 
"Transient and Permanent in Christianity" 
heralded the coming of the church univer- 
sal: 

[10] 



INTRODUCTION 



"Whose temple shall be all space; 
Whose shrine shall be the heart; 
Whose creed shall be the truth ; 

Whose ritual shall be works of love and usefulness; 
Whose profession of faith shall be divine life; 
Whose constant aspiration shall be to be perfect as 
God is perfect." 

Today we are glad to claim these men as 
among the richest fruits of the liberal faith, 
and yet we find a striking commentary upon 
the Unitarianism of that day in Dr. Everett's 
pathetic statement that "of the two men who 
were to do more than any others to shape its 
future history, one turned his back upon 
Unitarianism and upon the other Unitarian- 
ism turned its back." Today both of these 
names are included in our Unitarian hall of 
fame. 

The third period has been one of recon- 
struction and readjustment. Its watchword 
has been organization for efficiency. It has 
been dominated by no one or two men. It 
has been the result of a common spirit and 
purpose .gradually taking possession of the 
whole body. Channing and his successors 

[ii] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



fought the battle of intellectual freedom. 
Emerson and Parker compelled a recogni- 
tion of the supreme authority of truth. 
Their successors realized, as one of their 
number expressed it, that what the world 
really needs " is not merely truth and free- 
dom but truth, freedom and usefulness." 
And so it has been upon usefulness, service- 
ableness, devotion to the common weal, that 
the churches of this latter period have placed 
the chief emphasis. The immediate result 
has been a pronounced impetus toward 
church extension. Of the three hundred and 
forty-four churches founded during the last 
century, two hundred and thirty-one were 
organized during the last forty years of it. 
These are all free churches, made up of "the 
Lord's free people." In common with all 
others of the Unitarian faith they recognize 
no external authority in belief or morals. 
Every church is free to formulate its own 
belief and to determine its own practice and 
it grants the same freedom to each individual 
member. And yet, through their efforts for 
a more positive and constructive faith, a more 

[12] 



INTRODUCTION 



effective organization and a larger recogni- 
tion of the responsibilities of freedom, there 
has been achieved, by these free churches of 
America, a unity of belief and a unanimity 
of purpose which are without parallel in any 
of the churches which have relied upon the 
constraint of theological creeds or ecclesiasti- 
cal forms, 

Abraham Lincoln, when asked why he had 
never joined a church, replied: "Because I 
have found difficulty in giving my assent, 
without mental reservations, to the long and 
complicated statements of Christian doctrine 
which characterize their articles of belief and 
confessions of faith. When any church will 
inscribe over its altars, as its sole qualification 
for membership, the Saviour's condensed 
statement of the substance of both law and 
gospel, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart and with all thy soul and 
with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thy- 
self/ that church will I join with all my heart 
and all my soul." This is substantially the 
position of our Unitarian churches today. 
We accept the religion of Jesus as summed 

[13] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



up in love to God and man, and welcome to 
our fellowship all who are in sympathy with 
our purpose and practical aims. Never 
were we so united in spirit and purpose ; 
never so efficiently organized for practical 
Christian work; never so assured that what- 
ever may be the name of the future religion 
of America, it will be essentially Unitarian in 
spirit and purpose. The only church for a 
free people is a free church. The only reli- 
gion for a democratic people is a democratic 
religion. 



[14] 



Have we not all one Father? 
Hath not one God created us? 

Malachi II, 10. 

To us there is one God, the Father, 
of whom are all things and we unto Him. 

1 Corinthians VIII, 6. 



GOD 



THE problem of the centuries has been 
how to secure an adequate conception 
of God. Primitive religion was based upon 
the assumption of a localized deity. Pres- 
ent day religion depends for its very life 
upon the thought of God as everywhere pres- 
ent and everywhere operative in the world 
that he has made. These two conceptions 
differ by almost the whole diameter of being. 
The transition from one to the other has been 
made with great difficulty and to many it has 
seemed to involve the complete overthrow of 
the foundations upon which all religion rests. 

The poets are often our best theologians. 
They apprehend through intuition what 
others attain only through the slower pro- 
cess of reasoning. The Epilogue to Brown- 
ing's "Dramatis Personae" contains more 
and better theology than many a theological 
treatise. It reports a supposed discussion 
between King David and Renan, with the 

[in 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



poet standing by as arbiter and judge and 
rendering the final verdict. David speaks 
for Hebrew supernaturalism. He pictures 
the pomp and splendor of the ancient temple 
worship, with its stately ritual and elaborate 
ceremonial. The discussion takes place at 
the time of the feast of dedication. The 
robed priests and the Levites give the signal 
for the hosts of Israel to assemble. Moved 
by the sound of the music and the spectacle 
of the smoke and the flame of the sacrificial 
fires, the people bow before the visible pres- 
ence of Jehovah. 

"Then the temple filled with a cloud, 

Even the house of the Lord; 
Porch bent and pillar bowed; 

For the presence of the Lord, 
In the glory of the cloud, 

Had filled the house of the Lord." 

To Renan, the skeptic, all this savored of 
the superstition of a past age. He had 
drunk deep of the springs of scientific know- 
ledge and, for him, the last spark of the an- 
cient faith had been extinguished. The face 
which seemed, to others, to materialize amid 

[18] 



GOD 

the smoke of the altar and was so real that 
it called forth the worship of an adoring mul- 
titude, had been swallowed up in darkness. 
The star, which once shone so brightly, had 
"lost itself in the multitude of lesser lights." 
He tried to pierce the heavens, but in vain. 
He longed for the return of the ancient sym- 
bols, but to no avail. The mood of faith had 
departed and he was left alone with his skep- 
ticism and despair. Nowhere can we find 
a truer expression of the sense of loss which 
attends the dissipation of one's childhood 
faith under the withering touch of science 
than in Renan's last lines. 

"Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post, 
Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals, 
Ghastly dethronement, cursed by those the most 
On whose repugnant brow the crown next falls/' 

Such is the inevitable result when God is 
banished from his universe and man becomes 
monarch of all he surveys. 

Then speaks the poet. To a world thus 
mentally and spiritually distraught he de- 
livers his message. David and Renan, piet- 

[19] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



ist and skeptic, both have erred, — one in the 
materializing of faith, the other in the aban- 
donment of faith. God will not reveal him- 
self in response to the pomp and splendor 
of ritual worship. Neither will he abdicate 
his throne at the behest of science. The 
world throbs and pulsates with his life and 
is informed by his spirit. The face, which 
once looked out from the smoke and the 
flame, now tabernacles within each human 
heart. The star, which once illumined the 
heavens, now shines in the firmament of each 
human soul. One whose universe is thus 
filled with God has no need of a temple 
made with hands. One who is conscious of 
the presence of God in his own soul does 
not need to scan the heavens for miracle or 
sign. As Browning says: 

"Why, where's the need of a Temple, when the walls 

O* the world are that? What use of swells and falls. 

From Levites' choir, Priests* cries and trumpet calls? 

That one face, far from vanish, rather grows, 

Or decomposes but to recompose, 

Becomes my universe that feels and knows." 



We shall look far for a finer expression of 

[20] 



GOD 



religious faith. A universe that feels and 
knows, that is conscious and intelligent, is 
itself God and every constituent part of it is 
an expression of the life of God. The poet's 
verdict is confirmed by the reasoned judg- 
ment of mankind. 

The first question which one is prompted 
to ask concerning this God who is at once 
immanent and transcendent is, "Is he real? 
Or is he the invention of priestcraft and su- 
perstition?" This question never presented 
itself to our fathers, with their tiny universe 
and their tinier God. He was simply a 
magnified type of the world emperor, and 
his sway was as arbitrary and irresponsible 
as that of any earthly ruler. As long as 
this conception survived, it made possible all 
sorts of schemes for mediation and interces- 
sion. It fixed a great gulf between God and 
man. He could be approached only at 
stated seasons, through prescribed function- 
aries and after suitable propitiation. All 
the conventional machinery of medieval 
court circles was duplicated in the traditional 
theology. It was a great day for priest- 

[21] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



craft and ecclesiasticism ; but a sad day for 
pure and undefiled religion. 

Such a conception could endure only as 
long as the circle of ideas which gave it birth. 
We live in a world which is immeasurably 
larger than that which was known to our 
fathers. Its dimensions have been pushed 
out through all space and yet we know that 
beyond the remotest star which the telescope 
has revealed there are worlds without num- 
ber. Its history has been pushed back 
through all time and yet we know that at 
the earliest authentic date which the historian 
can discover the world was hundreds of 
millenniums old and human society in com- 
paratively an advanced state of development. 
Can we wonder that men have been so over- 
whelmed by this sudden enlargement of the 
universe that their faith in God has been 
shaken and sometimes completely destroyed? 
In a real universe, reaching back through 
infinite time and out through infinite space, 
what becomes of God? Can w T e think of 
him as real, as actually existing, and espe- 
cially as interested in the activities and 

[22] 



GOD 



watching over the welfare of the inhabitants 
of what, at best, is but a second rate planet 
in one of the smaller solar systems? 

Such questions are not academic ; they are 
real. And yet they are not flattering to the 
human intellect. Why should the larger 
universe demand a smaller God? Or why 
should it be able to subsist with no God? 
Science has not accounted for the world 
when it has succeeded in explaining its laws. 
A law accounts for nothing. It simply des- 
cribes a mode of operation. Back of all the 
affirmations of science we find the same ques- 
tions which baffled our fathers. Who first 
established the world? Who ordained its 
laws? Who assigned its destiny? To such 
questions there is but one answer, and that is, 
"God." We may call him by different 
names or by no name at all, but in the last 
analysis we are obliged to seek an explana- 
tion of the universe in the existence of some 
supreme and sovereign power. Instead of 
dispensing with God, we have simply taken 
him from his tiny throne in the heavens and 
allowed him to enthrone himself in the urii- 

[23] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



verse. Without him the world is unintelli- 
gible. It cannot be explained as a chance 
collocation of atoms or as a haphazard con- 
catenation of blind f orces. Its progress can 
be understood only in the light of an intelli- 
gent and controlling purpose. But intelli- 
gence and purpose are attributes of conscious 
personality, not of material atoms and physi- 
cal forces. The highest affirmation of mod- 
ern science is the fundamental assumption of 
all religion, — the affirmation of the universe 
as the expression of the ceaseless activity of 
an intelligent and purposeful Being. To 
the eye that sees, as to Mrs. Browning, 

' 'Earth's crammed with heaven 

And every common bush aflame with God/' 

Can we think of this God as personal? 
Our answer will depend upon what we un- 
derstand by personality. To many it sug- 
gests finiteness. H. G. Wells pictures his 
Invisible King as having a definite beginning 
in time, struggling ever toward perfection 
and summoning us to assist him in the strug- 
gle. Otherwise, writes Mr. Wells, he could 

[24] 



GOD 

not be a person, for "to be a person is to have 
characteristics and to be limited by charac- 
teristics." Such a conception springs from 
the fact that we know personality only in its 
finite, human form. It exists unlimited and 
complete only in God. Instead of being 
finite, he is the only being who is infinite. 
Instead of being limited, he is the only being 
who transcends all limitations. It is just 
this absence of finitude and limitation that 
makes him God. We could not long stand 
in awe of one who is only a little more power- 
ful than ourselves. Nor bow in reverence 
before one who is only a little wiser and 
better. Personality implies thought, feel- 
ing, will, and these are known to us only as 
they are embodied in human form. Raise 
these to infinite power and we have an infi- 
nite personality. We have God. The 
heart and soul of all religion is the conscious- 
ness that we live "under his eye and by his 
power/' We can still "smile" when we 
think that "His Greatness flows around our 
incompleteness, round our restlessness His 
Rest." 

[25] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 

But can we claim such a God as our 
Father? In the thought of his magnitude, 
do not all fatherly qualities disappear? 
Can we think of an infinite Father consent- 
ing to the late war with all its horrors? Or 
standing complacent in the midst of our 
present industrial strife? Such questions 
betray a mistaken conception of infinitude. 
Even an infinite being cannot create a uni- 
verse of law and order and then set at naught 
the laws which he has ordained. He cannot 
endow men with free wills as evidence of 
moral capacity and then stand between them 
and the consequences of their misdeeds. 
Even an earthly father sometimes chastises 
his children and the Heavenly Father is not 
freed from this necessity. "Whom the Lord 
loveth, he chasteneth." Whether or not 
God is our father depends, not upon the 
magnitude of his world, but upon the rela- 
tionship which he sustains to his children. 
The essence of fatherhood is community of 
nature. This community of nature has not 
been disturbed by our enlarging conception 
of the world in which we live. The life that 

[26] 



GOD 



thrills our being is still his life. The love 
that gives meaning and worth to life is still 
the reflection of his love. The will that gives 
to love its effectiveness is still an expression 
of his power. The conscience which gives 
to the will its direction and aim is still the 
shadow of his goodness. These are all dif- 
ferent phases of the life of God in the souls 
of men. Who but a father imparts his life 
to his children, shields them with his love, 
prompts them to do the right and rebukes 
them when wrong? The Fatherhood of 
God, instead of being lost in this larger uni- 
verse, is revealed for the first time in all its 
fullness. All human experience points to 
the presence of a living, loving, benevolent 
and beneficent personality who holds the 
worlds in his embrace and is not far from 
any one of us. He is our Father in Heaven 
and our ever present friend and helper upon 
the earth. 

Why has this conception been so slow in 
winning the acceptance of the religious 
world? Why is it that even now it is so 
often called into question? Largely because 

[27] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



of the traditional attitude of the church. 
Instead of faith in God it has emphasized 
certain beliefs about God. It is no longer 
necessary to discuss the attempt of our 
Trinitarian friends to confine God within 
the limits of a mathematical formula. To- 
day this formula is either repudiated or ex- 
plained away by the descendants of those 
who first framed it. The effectual argu- 
ment against Calvinism is not mathematical 
but moral. Its real offense was not that it 
promulgated certain conceptions of God 
which affronted the intellect, but that it as- 
cribed to God certain attributes which af- 
fronted the moral sense so that good men re- 
volted from them in horror. We have a 
right to demand that God shall be as good 
as the best of men, and yet we should hesi- 
tate to ascribe to the worst of men conduct 
which the old theology ascribed to God. As 
one of our liberal thinkers once said to a 
Calvinistic friend, "Your God is my devil." 
He was not a father but a fiend. Worship 
implies worth. Where there is no worth, 
worship is impossible. 

[28] 



GOD 

If we seek the highest revelation of God, 
we must look for it in the highest product 
of creative evolution, man himself. To re- 
ceive the best revelation, we must sit at the 
feet of the best of men. This is what makes 
Jesus the supreme revealer of God. Others 
had thought of God as their father, but with 
them the relationship was purely physical. 
God was a sort of prehistoric ancestor, a 
mythical parent, from whom the tribe or 
clan traced its descent. With Jesus the re- 
lationship was purely spiritual. Seizing 
upon a word which symbolizes one of the 
most familiar of human relationships, he 
made it the expression of his own best 
thought concerning God and his relation to 
men. With him God was not the All- 
mighty King, nor the All-righteous Judge; 
he was the All-loving Father. We acknowl- 
edge our debt to Jesus, not because he was 
the first to invent the phrase or to discover 
the relationship, but because he was the first 
to make it the central feature of his religious 
teaching. In the words which were most 
often upon his lips, "Our Father," we have 

[29] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



the most fundamental fact in human experi- 
ence expressed in the simplest and most in- 
telligible form. Beyond that we do not need 
to go. It is the highest conception that the 
human intellect can reach or the human heart 
desire. As Unitarians we are content to sit 
at Jesus' feet and learn of his Father and 
our Father, his God and our God. 



[30] 



What think ye of Christ? 

Matthew XXII, Jfi. 

Born of the seed of David according to the flesh and 
declared to be the Son of God, with power, according 
to the spirit of holiness. 

Romans I, S—jfr. 



JESUS 



WHAT think ye of Christ? This is 
one of the most absorbing questions 
of Christian history. It is the one question 
which remains to differentiate evangelical 
from non-evangelical Christianity. Other 
questions which once divided men have been 
answered satisfactorily or relegated to an 
oblivion from which they ought never to be 
recalled. This remains as the most widely 
applied test of Christian fellowship. Mem- 
bership in the Young Men's and Young 
Women's Christian Associations, the Fed- 
eral Council of the Churches of Christ in 
America and the Interchurch World Move- 
ment is conditioned by it. Men are judged 
by their opinions about Jesus, not by their 
success or failure in appropriating to them- 
selves the spirit of Jesus. It is this that 
gives peculiar significance to the Unitarian 
answer. 

Unitarians believe, with St. Paul, that 
Jesus was born of the seed of David accord- 

[33] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



ing to the flesh and declared to be the Son of 
God according to the spirit of holiness. In 
other words, he was born a purely human 
child and revealed his divine origin by the 
purity of his life and the nobility of his char- 
acter. They also believe, with the great 
apostle, that God was in Christ reconciling 
the world to himself. These beliefs however 
are not peculiar to Unitarians. They are 
accepted by all Christian people. All admit 
that God was incarnate in Jesus. They 
differ only as to the nature and extent of 
this incarnation. Is it an accomplished fact 
or a continuous process? Was God present 
in Jesus alone or is he present in all human- 
ity? If he was present only in the one his- 
toric figure, Jesus of Nazareth, we have no 
right to call him "Father." If he is pres- 
ent in humanity at large, we have no right 
to call him anything else. Thus the whole 
question of our filial relationship to God and 
our fraternal relationship to one another de- 
pends upon our conception of the incarna- 
tion. It is a doctrine fundamental to Chris- 
tianity. 

[34] 



JESUS 

Historically this doctrine is an outgrowth 
of human experience. The early Christians 
were compelled to account for the character 
and personality of Jesus and for his wonder- 
ful influence over the hearts and lives of men. 
True children of their age, they attributed 
them to the fact that God was present in 
him in a manner which could not be affirmed 
of other men and then sought to account for 
this miraculous presence. One group of 
writers found the explanation in the peculiar 
circumstances which attended his birth. 
They asserted that the Holy Spirit usurped 
the place of a human father, and conse- 
quently that Jesus was miraculously con- 
ceived and miraculously born. Another 
group of writers found this explanation 
puerile and unsatisfactory. They sought 
another by resort to philosophic speculation. 
They affirmed that Jesus was the incarnate 
Logos, or Word, which had become flesh and 
dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. 
This is the fundamental distinction between 
the first three gospels and the fourth. The 
Christian church has accepted and perpetu- 

[35] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



ated both of these explanations, notwith- 
standing the fact that they are mutually con- 
tradictory and destructive. If Jesus was the 
child of Mary through the agency of the 
Holy Spirit, he was not the incarnate Logos. 
If he was the incarnate Logos, the Holy 
Spirit could have had nothing to do with his 
coming into the world. 

It is the consciousness of this discrepancy 
which has led to the reopening of the whole 
question. A study of the New Testament 
records for the purpose of ascertaining the 
facts concerning Jesus' birth has made con- 
fusion worse confounded. St. Paul and two 
of the gospel writers maintain an absolute 
silence concerning it, while the two who men- 
tion it, Matthew and Luke, are in hopeless 
disagreement. Both give the genealogy of 
Jesus, but they differ in the number of gen- 
erations between him and David and in the 
names of those through whom the descent 
was maintained. Both trace that descent 
through Joseph, which would be absolutely 
meaningless if Jesus were not his son. Both 
contain an annunciation, but in one it is to 

[36] 



JESUS 



Mary and in the other to Joseph. Both lo- 
cate the birth in Bethlehem, but in one the 
parents live in Nazareth and are summoned 
to Bethlehem at an opportune moment, while 
in the other they live in Bethlehem, but flee 
to Nazareth in order to escape the wrath of 
Herod. When we turn from these birth 
stories to the main portions of the gospels, 
we find nothing in the words of Jesus or 
Mary or any of the disciples to indicate that 
Jesus had ever lived in Bethlehem, or that 
his birth had been different from that of 
other Hebrew children of that period. 

A candid examination of these birth stories 
proves conclusively that the writers were 
indulging their fancy and not recording 
facts. They were trying to account for the 
impression which Jesus made upon his 
fellows, and they did it in the only way in 
which the men of that day could account for 
a personality which seemed to transcend the 
limits of humanity. With their conception 
of human nature as essentially depraved and 
corrupt, they were obliged to attribute to 
him superhuman origin and supernatural 

[37] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



power. The history of ancient peoples and 
of primitive religions affords many a paral- 
lel. In Egypt, Apis was said to have been 
born of a virgin and to have been the incarna- 
tion of Osiris. Chang Tao Ling, in China, 
Krishna and Buddha in India, and countless 
heroes of Greek and Roman mythology were 
similarly honored. With our better under- 
standing of the dignity and worth of human 
nature, we are no longer under the necessity 
of resorting to such crude methods of ex- 
plaining the exceptional among our fellow- 
men. We no longer regard the birth of 
Jesus as in any way supernatural or miracu- 
lous. We cannot believe that we add to its 
impressiveness by removing it from the cate- 
gory of normal human births. To assume 
that the Saviour of the world must enter life 
by some other channel is an insult to human 
motherhood which could have been perpe- 
trated only in an age which cherished a low 
estimate of human nature. It is the work of 
those who, in the words of Sir Edwin Arnold, 

"Dimly see thy godlike self and take 
True glory from thee for false glory's sake." 
[38] 



JESUS 



The explanation found at the beginning 
of the Fourth Gospel fares little better at 
the hands of the New Testament critics. It 
is possible today to trace it directly to its 
varied sources. It is a crude mixture of 
Hebrew mysticism, Greek philosophy and 
Alexandrian metaphysics. The achieve- 
ment of the author of this gospel was made 
possible by the Hebrew custom of personify- 
ing wisdom. The book of Proverbs states 
that Jehovah, by the aid of wisdom, founded 
the earth; also that wisdom was brought 
forth before the world was made and was 
present at the time of its creation. In his 
letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of 
Jesus as the wisdom of God. There was a 
similar tendency to personify the divine 
word. Isaiah puts into the mouth of Je- 
hovah the declaration, "My word shall not 
return unto me void, but it shall accomplish 
that which I please, and it shall prosper in 
the thing whereto I sent it." 

A parallel effort to personify the attri- 
butes of deity had been made among the 
Greeks. Plato conceived of the universe as 

[39] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



a living, rational being, who revealed himself 
to the human reason through a series of ideas 
or words. This conception was taken up by 
the Stoics and made one of the great agencies 
for the intellectual and moral advancement 
of the Greco-Roman world. To Philo, the 
Alexandrian Jew, belongs the credit for fus- 
ing the Stoic philosophy and the Hebrew 
metaphysic into a theological system which 
would not be repugnant to the strict mono- 
theism of the Jews. He identified the He- 
brew Wisdom with the Greek Logos or 
Word, and affirmed that it was the agent of 
creation and the instrument of revelation. 
"The Word was with God and it was God. 
Through him all things were made and in 
him all things consist." 

Although Philo personified this Word of 
God, he never conceived of it as incarnate in 
an historic human personality. For this step 
we are indebted to the unknown author of the 
Fourth Gospel. He was the first to identify 
the Logos with the historic Jesus. To Paul 
and the earlier gospel writers, Jesus was the 
Son of God. To Philo, the Logos was the 

[40] 



JESUS 



Son of God. The author of the Fourth 
Gospel, proceeding upon the assumption 
that things that are equal to the same thing 
are equal to each other, identified Jesus with 
the Logos and ascribed to him its unique at- 
tributes and powers. "In the beginning was 
the Word, and the Word was with God and 
the Word was God." This is the voice of 
Philo, the Alexandrian Jew. "And the 
Word became flesh and dwelt among men." 
This is the contribution of the gospel writer. 
It is the first clear expression of the embodi- 
ment of the Logos in Jesus and constitutes 
the scriptural basis of the doctrine of the 
incarnation. The eternal Logos or Word 
had become incarnate in a finite human be- 
ing. It was no longer a philosophical ab- 
straction; it had become an object of faith 
and love. 

The importance of the service rendered by 
this conception cannot be overestimated. 
The Greek mind thought of God as imma- 
nent in bis universe. The Hebrew mind 
thought of him as dwelling apart from his 
universe. It was constitutionally unfitted 

[41] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



to receive the conception of an immanent 
God except as it was mediated through an- 
other being. Thus far the doctrine served 
a beneficent end. It preserved the doctrine 
of a divine humanity at a time when men 
could conceive of it in no other terms. At 
the same time, by removing Jesus from the 
sphere of humanity and endowing him with 
superhuman attributes, it made it impossi- 
ble for him to be conceived of as humanity's 
ideal. The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is 
devoid of almost every human attribute. 
The story of his life is robbed of almost every 
human characteristic. There is no baptism, 
no temptation, no proclamation of the com- 
ing kingdom, no agony in the garden, no cry 
of despair on the cross. All these are incon- 
sistent with the dignity of the incarnate 
Logos. The prolonged discourses which 
the author puts into the mouth of Jesus 
make it certain that he thought of him as es- 
sentially different in nature from other men 
and sustaining different relations with the 
Father. The ideal which he exemplified was 
impossible of either imitation or realization 

[42] 



JESUS 



by them. And so, as the thought of the di- 
vine immanence came to be more widely ac- 
cepted and better understood, this concep- 
tion went the way of its predecessor. It lost 
its power of appeal. As men learn to ap- 
preciate the essential oneness of the life of 
the universe, they turn from the mythical 
Christ of the Fourth Gospel, to the Jesus of 
the other three, only to find that the moral 
and religious value of his life is not lessened, 
but enhanced, by the recognition of its purely 
human character. 

But what of the incarnation? Shall it be 
eliminated from the scheme of Christian doc- 
trine? Not at all. The experience out of 
which it grew is as valid as ever. The im- 
pression which Jesus' life and character 
make upon Christian men and women has 
grown stronger with each succeeding genera- 
tion. If we reject the traditional explana- 
tion of his influence over the hearts and lives 1 
of men, we are morally bound to find some 
explanation of it which shall be more in ac- 
cord with the facts. The modern man is 
compelled to translate the old doctrine into 

[43] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



the terms of the new theology and of the new 
science. It is God in Christ appealing to the 
God in us, which accounts for the growing 
power of the Christ ideal. The defect of the 
older conception was not that it claimed too 
much for Jesus, but that it claimed too little 
for humanity. What it affirmed of him, we 
affirm of the race. Instead of putting him 
in a class by himself, too remote from us to 
be spiritually helpful, we welcome him as the 
first born of many brethren. And the dis- 
tinctive merit of this larger conception is that 
it does justice to all concerned. It does not 
degrade God by assuming that he could em- 
body himself in a single historic personality. 
It does not degrade Jesus by reducing him 
to the level of a "mere man." It does not 
degrade humanity by assuming that it is sep- 
arated from God by a gulf which Christ 
alone can bridge. The grace that was in 
Jesus is latent in us. The divine love and 
wisdom revealed through him are constantly 
seeking expression through us. 

Such a conception may seem to be a wide 
departure from the traditional doctrine, but 

[44] 



JESUS 



it is the only conception which science makes 
possible. Belief in an immanent God makes 
it necessary to assume that the life of God 
is manifest in every part of his creation. 
The form and magnitude of this manifesta- 
tion is conditioned by the nature and capac- 
ity of the medium through which it is re- 
vealed. In stock and stone, in plant and 
tree, in the conscious life of the lower ani- 
mals, we behold the varying manifestations 
of the life of God. In one it is force, in an- 
other vital energy, in another consciousness, 
and yet, 

"God is seen God, 
In the star, in the stone^ in the fleshy ... in the 

clod." 

Let us assume that, throughout the 
ages, there has been a constant increase in 
this capacity to receive and show forth the 
life of God, until, at last, there appears a 
creature capable of standing erect, turning 
his gaze heavenward and reflecting not only 
the power and the glory of God, but also his 
goodness and wisdom and love. For ages 
God had been waiting patiently for the evo- 

[45] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



lution of just such a medium. When it ap- 
peared, he breathed into it his spirit and it 
became a living soul. This is the real mira- 
cle of the incarnation. It is not the incarna- 
tion of God in the person of one man cen- 
turies ago, but the progressive embodiment 
of the life of God in the souls of men 
throughout the ages. In the words of R. J. 
Campbell, "All human history is the pro- 
gressive incarnation of God," and all human 
life "divine, and eternal, integral to the being 
of God." 

Let us assume, also, that there has been 
a constant evolution of this higher medium, 
until, at length, there appears one with a soul 
so sensitive to every breath of the eternal 
spirit and a will so in accord with the divine 
will that in him men thought that they be- 
held the Father himself. They said, "This 
is the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
And yet his value for our moral and spiritual 
life lies in the fact that this Christ never 
transcends human limits. In him we see 
humanity at its best. Whatever differences 
there may be between him and us are differ- 

[46] 



JESUS 



ences of degree and not of kind. What he 
was, we are destined to become. 

"Progress is the law of life, man is not 

Man as yet, 
Nor shall I deem his object served, 

his end 
Attained" 

until 

"all mankind alike is perfected." 

Browning is right. Our task on earth will 
never be accomplished until all mankind is 
perfected, until all grow into the stature of 
perfect manhood as revealed to us in Jesus. 

This is the Unitarian conception of Jesus. 
He is not a God to be worshipped but a 
leader to be followed. As President Burton 
has said: "He was all God could be in 
human terms." If we would know the ef- 
fectiveness of such a conception we have 
only to turn to the lives of those who have 
cherished it. It has been maintained that 
the strength of orthodoxy is its loyalty to the 
personal Christ and its sense of dependence 
upon him, both of which are supposed to be 

[47] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



confirmed by a belief in his deity. Also that 
the weakness of liberal Christianity is its 
failure to inspire this f eeling of personal loy- 
alty and responsibility. But why? Why 
should the man Jesus exercise a less potent 
influence for good than the deified Jesus? 
Why should his appeal to our personal alle- 
giance be less imperative and strong? Why 
should we think less of one who is capable 
of being a real leader than of one who at 
best is only a play actor on the cosmic stage? 
Must intelligence always be purchased at the 
expense of faith, and independence at the 
expense of devotion? 

Today the world yearns as never before 
for Christian unity. One of the greatest 
steps toward the achievement of this goal 
would be the acceptance, by all Christian 
people, of this humanitarian conception of 
the person and work of Jesus. At heart the 
great majority of them accept it today. 
Evangelical Christians have tried to make 
the belief in the deity of Christ the sole con- 
dition of religious fellowship and yet their 
very language proves that what they have 

[48] 



JESUS 



in mind is not deity but divinity. They 
criticize the liberal churches for their denial 
of the divinity of Jesus, when what they have 
in mind is not divinity but deity. Has not 
the time come to put an end to this purely 
verbal controversy, accustom ourselves to the 
same vocabulary, and unite in such loyal de- 
votion to one common Lord and Master that 
all speculation as to his deity or divinity 
shall be swallowed up in the consciousness 
of his perfect humanity? Admit, with 
Tennyson, that he was 

"Most human and yet most divine, 
The flower of man and God." 

and we can say, with Richard Watson 
Gilder: 

"If Jesus Christ is a man, 

And only a man, I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to him 

And to him will I cleave alway; 

If Jesus Christ is a God, 

And the only God, I swear 
I will follow him through heaven and hell. 

The earth, the sea and the air." 
[49] 



Know ye not that ye are the temple of God 
and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you. 

1 Corinthians III, 16. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



SECOND only in importance to the be- 
lief concerning the person and work of 
J esus is that concerning the office and func- 
tion of the Holy Spirit. Both problems 
have their origin in the gradual disintegra- 
tion of the traditional doctrine of the Trin- 
ity. In other days the solution was per- 
fectly simple. The Holy Spirit was the 
third member in that Trinity, sharing with 
the Father and the Son the honor of repre- 
senting the divine Being. As such he was 
a distinct personality, with functions quite 
distinct from those of the other two. Now 
that we have restored to God his absolute 
and undivided unity and assigned to Jesus 
his rightful place among men, what becomes 
of the Holy Spirit? Can we think of it as 
an independent personality, contending the 
absoluteness of the Father? Or as the third 
member in a metaphysical and wholly incom- 
prehensible Trinity? Or must we think of 

[53] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



it as the power of God, working silently 
but persistently, and conforming all things 
to his will? It is to this latter view that 
Unitarians are irrevocably committed. 

The traditional doctrine was the result of 
a gradual growth. When St. Paul made 
his second visit to Ephesus, he found there 
a little group of Christians, converts of 
Apollos, and asked: "Did ye receive the 
Holy Spirit when ye believed?" They re- 
plied : "We did not so much as hear whether 
there is a Holy Spirit." Three centuries 
later Gregory of Nanzianzus, one of the 
church fathers, wrote: "Of our thoughtful 
men, some regard the Holy Spirit as an op- 
eration, some as a creature, some as God, 
while others are at a loss to decide, seeing 
that the Scripture determines nothing on 
this subject." Shortly before his death Pro- 
fessor Royce, of Harvard, declared that 
"The central problem in our present attempt 
at a theology must be that which traditional 
Christian theology has so strangely neg- 
lected, the problem of what the religious con- 
sciousness has called the Holy Spirit." 

[54] 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



"Here," he adds, "lies the real central idea 
of any distinctive Christian metaphysic." 
These quotations suggest the stages through 
which the doctrine has passed. First, igno- 
rance of the Spirit's existence; second, un- 
certainty as to its nature and function; and 
third, conviction as to its importance as cen- 
tral to an intelligent understanding of the 
Christian faith. 

In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is 
the medium of revelation and the instrument 
of the divine activity. In the birth stories 
it usurps the place of the natural father and 
Jesus is born of a virgin. At the baptism 
it descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove. 
When Jesus is about to leave his disciples 
he promises to send the Holy Spirit to com- 
fort them and to guide them into a larger 
understanding of the truth. The one unfor- 
givable sin is blasphemy against the Holy 
Spirit. At Pentecost it was the descent of 
the Holy Spirit which accounted for the 
marvellous phenomena which we associate 
with that day. St. Paul is so convinced that 
it is the presence of the Holy Spirit which 

[55] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



accounts for Jesus' power that he does not 
attempt to differentiate one from the other. 
He uses the terms interchangeably. Now it 
is Christ that dwells in the new convert and 
makes him a new creature and again it is 
the Spirit. Once he says unequivocally, 
"Now the Lord," meaning the risen Christ, 
not the historical Jesus, "Now the Lord is 
the Spirit." The apostolic benediction alone 
attempts a differentiation. That is why 
it is so often interpreted as a Trinitarian 
formula. If so it could not have been used 
by Paul. Whatever else he may have been, 
he was not a Trinitarian. Writing to the 
Christians at Corinth he asks that the grace 
that had been manifest in Jesus might be 
manifest in them, that the love of God which 
had been the source of his inspiration might 
be with them, and that the consciousness of 
fellowship with the Father through the in- 
dwelling of his spirit might also be theirs. 
It requires some imagination to see in this 
an affirmation of the Trinity. 

The doctrine of the Trinity had its origin 
in the custom of joining together, for litur- 

[56] 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



gical purposes, the terms Father, Son and 
Holy Spirit. A familiar instance is the bap- 
tismal formula in which Jesus bids his dis- 
ciples baptize in the name of these three. 
At first there was no attempt to unite them 
as separate persons in one Godhead, or to 
conceive of them as distinct personalities. 
When, however, the necessity for a definite 
creed arose, this baptismal formula presented 
itself as a most convenient skeleton or frame- 
work. A study of the great creeds of 
Christendom, the Apostles', the Nicene and 
the Athanasian, will demonstrate that each 
is simply the elaboration of this primitive 
formula. 

Even when the Holy Spirit came to be 
regarded as the third member in the Trinity, 
its subordinate position was scrupulously 
maintained. In the earliest draft of the 
Apostles' creed, dating from the second cen- 
tury, twelve words are devoted to God, 
seventy to Jesus and only six to the Holy 
Spirit. For six centuries the simple state- 
ment, "I believe in the Holy Spirit," re- 
mained practically unchanged. The great 

[57] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



controversies of the early church raged about 
the nature of God and the person and work 
of Christ. Belief in the Holy Spirit was 
admitted with no attempt to define its nature 
or to prescribe its function. Later attempts 
at definition led to a controversy which rent 
the church in twain. To this day the chief 
distinction between the Greek and the Ro- 
man divisions of the Catholic church is that 
one believes that the Holy Spirit proceeds 
from the Father alone, the other that it comes 
forth from both the Father and the Son. 
Those who stand wholly outside of the con- 
troversy cannot understand how, if it is a 
distinct personality, it can proceed from 
either. And yet, in spite of these differences 
of interpretation, a dogma which is unscrip- 
tural, unscientific and illogical, is still re- 
tained as a part of the ecclesiastical furniture 
of certain churches under the assumption 
that it is essential to the Christian life. The 
continued existence of our free churches is 
an emphatic protest against this assumption. 

One of the characteristics of the newer re- 
ligious thinking is that it substitutes common 

[58] 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 

sense for metaphysical speculation and clear- 
ness of thought for an unreasoning faith. 
After centuries of theological controversy it 
enables us to say, with St. Paul, "To us there 
is one God, the Father ; and one Lord, Jesus 
Christ; and one Spirit, by which we are all 
baptized into one body." With this change 
of attitude the Holy Spirit assumes a 
position of dignity and importance. It is 
the inevitable corollary of a belief in the di- 
vine immanence. As long as God was 
thought of as transcendent, dwelling some- 
where apart from his world, it was only 
through the Spirit that he could have inter- 
course with that world. With an immanent 
God such mediation becomes superfluous. 
The Holy Spirit is God himself at work in 
his world. The divine life has been present 
in the world from the beginning. Through- 
out the ages it has expressed itself in ever 
higher forms of consciousness. In the He- 
brew people, because of their inherent re- 
ligiousness, it found its freest channel. And 
in Jesus Christ, a Jewish peasant, it found 
its highest expression. It was through this 

[59] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



indwelling Spirit that he became the supreme 
revelation of God to man, "all that God 
could be in human terms." 

This is the only conception of the nature 
and function of the Holy Spirit which is 
compatible with that theory of the universe 
and its relation to God which is the basis 
of all present-day thinking. Science has 
taught us to recognize a spiritual force, an 
infinite personality, at the heart of the uni- 
verse, animating it and dominating it as the 
soul animates and dominates the body. It 
has also taught us that there can be no con- 
sistent theory of the universe which fails to 
take account of its highest product, man him- 
self. If the world is a unity, we must be a 
part of that larger unity, and the same 
power which manifests itself in the world 
at large must throb and pulsate in us. This 
does not imply that all are reduced to one 
dead level of uniformity. There is diver- 
sity even in spiritual gifts. The capacity 
to receive determines the ability to reveal. 
One may be a Jesus, another a Paul, an- 
other the most ordinary type of humanity, 

[60] 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



but it is the same spirit which fills them all, 
each according to his capacity. The life 
which animates us is a part of the life of 
God. The love which binds us to one an- 
other is a reflection of his love. The will 
which keeps us constant to an ever ascending 
goal is an expression of his purpose. The 
sense of right and duty which informs that 
will and helps to determine our conduct is 
but another name for that "stern daughter 
of the voice of God" who holds the worlds 
in her embrace and ' 'prevents the very stars 
from going wrong." 

Thus an attempt to know and to under- 
stand our common human nature brings us 
irresistibly to the conclusion that the Holy 
Spirit is still a constant factor in human life 
and destiny. The life that thrills our be- 
ing, the love that gives significance to life, 
the will that enables love to express itself 
in action, and the conscience that keeps that 
action clean and pure, are but differing 
phases of the life of God in the souls of 
men. They are just as real and just as 
significant as the energy that drives the 

[61] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



world on in its course, or the affinity that 
holds its parts together, or the force that 
enables it to do its work, or the system of 
checks and balances that keeps that force 
within certain prescribed bounds. All alike 
point to the presence of a living, loving, will- 
ing and beneficent personality who in- 
habiteth the eternities and yet is not far 
from any one of us. 

"Speak to him thou, for he hears, 
And spirit with spirit can meet; 

Closer is he than breathing, 
Nearer than hands or feet." 

Today this conception of the Holy Spirit 
as but another name for God at work in his 
world is accepted by many who repudiate 
the Unitarian name. Nowhere do we find 
it more clearly expressed than in "The Chris- 
tian Doctrine of God," by Dr. William New- 
ton Clarke, an orthodox scholar of good and 
regular standing. He declares that God ex- 
presses himself not only in Christ, but also in 
the Holy Spirit. " The Spirit is Himself, 
God within." Its function is to continue, in 

[62] 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



the individual and the race, the work which 
Jesus began. "God, through Christ, is 
normalizing men," bringing them to the 
proper life and character as sons. The 
Spirit is called holy only in contrast with an 
unholy world. It is "God in his people." 
Dr. Clarke concludes: "God himself is the 
Father; God himself is the divine in the 
Son; and God himself is the Holy Spirit." 

Today this is good orthodoxy. It is also 
good Unitarianism. It is the attitude of the 
Christian world toward this conception 
which will determine the religion of the fu- 
ture. The religion of Jesus was primarily 
the religion of the Father. It was based 
upon the family relationship raised to infi- 
nite power. The religion of the early church 
was the religion of the Son. It centred in 
the person and work of Christ. More and 
more the religion of today is becoming es- 
sentially the religion of the Spirit. We have 
given up all questions as to its procession 
from the Father or the Son. We are try- 
ing to forget that it was ever the third mem- 
ber in an impossible Trinity. We are ac- 

[63] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



customing ourselves to think of it as " the 
perpetual witness of the life of God in the 
soul of man." As Dr. Peabody has said: 
"It is the immanent power of science, the 
progressive revelation of philosophy, the 
undeparting and undiminished inspiration of 
religion." 

This is the conception which must more 
and more commend itself to thoughtful men 
and women. Churches may continue to dif- 
fer in their dogmas and creeds, Christian 
men and women may differ in their belief 
and practice, and yet all may unite in the 
simple but sufficient affirmation, "We be- 
lieve in the Holy Spirit." Just as we can- 
not think of the sun apart from its rays of 
light and heat, so we cannot think of God 
apart from that subtle influence which radi- 
ates from him and gives life and light to the 
world. It is none other than the spirit of 
the living God, spiritual because he is Spirit, 
holy because he is Holy. Science affirms 
that the world in which we live is a spiritual 
world; faith assures us that the spirit which 
upholds and sustains it is the spirit of the 

[64] 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 

living God ; and the experience of every day 
teaches us that it is that same spirit which 
dwells in us and makes us his temples, 

"Go not, my soul, in search of him, 
Thou wilt not find him there, — 

Or in the depths of shadow dim, 
Or heights of upper air. 

For not in far-off realms of space 
The Spirit hath its throne; 

In every heart it findeth place 
And waiteth to be known." 



[65] 



Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable 
for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for in- 
struction which is in righteousness. 

2 Timothy III, 16. 



[67] 



THE BIBLE 



THE Unitarian attitude toward the 
Bible derives its chief importance from 
the frequent assertion that we do not believe 
in the Bible. All that this statement means 
is that we do not accept this or any other 
book as our sole guide in morals and religion. 
We regard the Bible as a human document, 
written by men and for men, and subject to 
the ordinary rules of criticism and research. 
Today this attitude is shared by the more 
scholarly men in all denominations. The 
Outlook stated recently that "It is clearly 
worse than futile for clergymen to insist that 
there has been no such revolution. It is 
clearly their duty to prepare their congre- 
gations to meet it by showing them that the 
religious life is not identified with or depen- 
dent upon the old, unscientific view of the 
scripture as an infallible rule of faith and 
practice." 

It would be difficult to find a more glar- 
[69] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



ing inconsistency than that between the 
world's estimate of the Bible and its ignor- 
ance of the Bible. Here is a book which is 
found upon the pulpit of every Christian 
church. It is to be seen, often in an excel- 
lent state of preservation, in almost every 
Christian home. It is the chief text-book 
in our schools of religious education. Lists 
of the world's best literature, coming from 
the most divergent sources, give it first place. 
When President Eliot was asked why he had 
omitted it from his six-foot book shelf for 
Harvard men, he replied that he had as- 
sumed that it would be found in the pos- 
session of every Harvard graduate. It has 
been printed in more languages and cir- 
culated in more lands than any other book. 
And yet, over against these facts, testifying 
to the world's appreciation of its intrinsic 
worth, we find the most colossal ignorance of 
its character and contents. There are multi- 
tudes of people who seem amazed when told 
that it is not a book at all, but a collection of 
books, and that its nearest analogy today is 
not some religious or theological treatise but 

[70] 



THE BIBLE 



one of the many libraries of the world's best 
literature. As to the authorship and dates 
of the various books of which it is composed, 
or the growth of its several canons or groups, 
or its interpretation in the light of present- 
day criticism, the great masses of men and 
women are hopelessly uninformed. 

How are we to account for this situation? 
How are we to reconcile the apparent appre- 
ciation and the seeming neglect? It is due 
to the fact that the traditional conception 
of the Bible and the conventional methods 
of Bible study have alienated the great ma- 
jority of thinking people. No arguments 
based upon intellectual or moral considera- 
tions have any weight if opposed to one soli- 
tary proof text. Passages are wrested from 
their context and twisted in their meaning 
for the purpose of supporting theological 
statements which often are irrational and 
sometimes repugnant to the moral sense. It 
is this misuse of the Bible which has made 
it, in the words of Reginald Campbell, "one 
of the greatest stumbling-blocks to spiritual 
religion." 

[71] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 

This method of interpretation is a heritage 
from the time when Christianity was eman- 
cipating itself from the yoke of the Roman 
church. The Protestant Reformation was 
undertaken in the name of the individual rea- 
son and conscience but its leaders did not 
dare to trust their new-found freedom. 
They repudiated one authority only to sub- 
mit themselves to another. In place of a 
divinely instituted church they installed a 
divinely inspired book. According to 
Catholic theory, the inspired book must be 
interpreted by an infallible church. What- 
ever errors it might seem to contain could 
then be explained away by the interpreters. 
But Protestantism found itself burdened 
with an infallible book for which there was 
no such interpreter, and therefore no safe- 
guard against error. Between these two 
theories of interpretation, reason and com- 
mon sense are both on the side of the Roman 
Catholic. Either we must abandon alto- 
gether the fetish of an infallible book, or we 
must find some way to secure an infallible 
interpreter. 

[72] 



THE BIBLE 

Unitarians prefer to abandon the fetish. 
In common with all thinking people, they 
recognize but two alternatives. The Bible 
is either a divine institution or a human docu- 
ment. Either it is wholly inspired, in the 
sense that every word is the w r ord of God, 
dictated and transmitted without error, or 
it is inspired only in the sense that all truth 
is from God and that every expression of 
truth, whatever its source, is a divine revela- 
tion. To those who are acquainted with the 
history of the Bible, its different versions, 
its scientific and historical inaccuracies, its 
conflicting expressions of moral and religious 
truth, the first alternative is impossible. It 
deserves to be laid away with the theory 
of a geocentric universe and a stationary 
earth. 

The other alternative affords us all that is 
needed to inspire a reverence for the Bible 
as, to quote Abraham Lincoln's words, "The 
best book God has given to men." It is a 
record of the thoughts and aspirations and 
ideals of the most religious people of the 
ancient world. Nowhere can we find more 

[73] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



exalted conceptions of the character of God 
or loftier ideals of the conduct of man. It 
is not an infallible utterance of moral and 
religious truth and it cannot be used as an 
infallible guide to either faith or practice, 
but rightly interpreted, it nourishes and sus- 
tains the moral and spiritual life of the race 
as no other book does or can. 

What has given us this newer method of 
interpretation? It is the much misunder- 
stood and much abused higher criticism. 
There is nothing concerning which there has 
been so much inexcusable misunderstanding 
and unreasoning fear. It has been de- 
nounced as hostile to the Bible and to reli- 
gion. It has been characterized as destruc- 
tive of the foundations of faith and morals. 
And yet it is this which has made the Bible 
intelligible and helpful to modern men and 
women., Without it, it would long since 
have been relegated to oblivion by all who 
have emancipated themselves from the fet- 
ters of credulity and superstition. If com- 
pelled to choose between the Bible as every- 
where the word of God and no Bible at all, 

[74] 



THE BIBLE 



one's choice would be no Bible at all. When 
permitted to choose between an intelligent 
understanding of the Bible and ignorance of 
its profound moral and religious truths, there 
is but one alternative. 

And what is this higher criticism? How 
is it differentiated from any other criticism? 
It is the criticism of the Bible books and of 
the documents upon which they are based 
considered as wholes. It is only in this re- 
spect that it differs from the lower criticism. 
One is textual, the other documental. One 
deals with particular words and phrases, the 
other with whole books or groups of books. 
One seeks to discover the true reading of the 
Bible text and to ascertain its original mean- 
ing; the other seeks to establish its genuine- 
ness and authenticity and to demonstrate its 
credibility and trustworthiness. Thus be- 
tween the two there can be no jealousy or 
antagonism. They occupy different fields; 
they deal with different sets of facts; they 
are directed toward different ends. To say 
that one is higher than the other in the sense 
that it calls for the exercise of higher facul- 

[75] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



ties is to say what would be repudiated by 
every member of both schools. 

The question is often raised as to whether 
the higher criticism is constructive or de- 
structive. Such a query has no significance 
whatsoever for one who is at all familiar 
with the processes. In its aim it is neither; 
in its methods it is both. It is simply the 
application to the Bible literature of the most 
approved scientific and critical methods. 
These methods are destructive only in the 
sense that the destruction of error is often 
the necessary preparation for the discovery 
of truth. The tearing down and the build- 
ing up are parts of one and the same pro- 
cess. The same is true of all search for 
truth. We do not hesitate to destroy old 
error if thereby some new truth can be re- 
vealed, and we judge of the process by the 
end achieved, not by the means employed. 
When Copernicus demonstrated that the 
earth revolves around the sun he destroyed 
forever the old Ptolemaic theory that the 
sun revolves around the earth. When 
Columbus proved that the earth is a globe 

[76] 



THE BIBLE 

by sailing round it, he destroyed forever the 
theory that it is a flat surface, with its four 
corners. The destructive work of the 
higher critics has been of this sort. It has 
destroyed, "not the Scriptures, not theology, 
not religion, but only a wrong interpretation 
of the Scriptures, a narrow conception of 
theology, and the pagan features of reli- 
gion." When it was demonstrated that 
several different authors collaborated in the 
composition of the first five books of the Old 
Testament, it was not necessary for the 
higher critic to assure us that they could not 
have been written by Moses or any one Old 
Testament writer. When it was proved 
that the second part of Isaiah refers to events 
which happened more than one hundred 
years after the death of the great prophet of 
that name, it required no extraordinary criti- 
cal power to infer that we have here the work 
of at least two different men, probably more, 
living more than a century apart, and all 
ascribed to a single writer. This is the kind 
of destructive work which it has been the 
privilege of the higher critics to do, and for 

[77] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



which the Christian world ought to be pro- 
foundly grateful. If any Christian dogma 
has been destroyed by the process, it is fair to 
assume that the dogma was wrong. Truth 
itself cannot be destroyed so easily. When 
any theory, Biblical or otherwise, is proved 
to be out of accord with the facts, it is only 
a mistaken sense of loyalty which insists 
upon its retention and abuses those who have 
furnished the proof. 

The Unitarian conception of the Bible 
rests squarely upon the results of the work 
of these higher critics. We no longer re- 
gard the Bible as supernaturally inspired. 
We no longer look upon it as everywhere the 
infallible word of God. We no longer turn 
to it with the expectation of finding precise 
directions as to our conduct in all possible 
emergencies. As we comprehend its nature 
and understand the working of men's minds 
in unscientific periods, and under circum- 
stances similar to those which surrounded the 
Biblical writers, we detect the folly of any 
theory of infallibility or inerrancy. "It is 
worth inquiring," writes Professor Youtz, 

[78] 



THE BIBLE 

an orthodox scholar, "whether the very 
phrase Holy Bible does not create a wrong 
mental attitude, an attitude of Bibliolatry, 
toward a book whose effort is to fix our 
reverence upon the only One who is Holy." 
And yet this modern attitude does not lessen 
our reverence or esteem for the book itself. 
The fact that it contains historical inaccura- 
cies and verbal ambiguities does not make 
it less worthy as a medium for the revelation 
of the divine will. Because of the lofty 
character of its moral and religious teaching 
and the light which it throws upon the origin 
and character of the best religion the world 
has yet known, we cherish a reverence for it 
which we cherish for no other book and we 
give to it a place in our affection which no 
other book can occupy. Interpreted as the 
infallible word of God, there is no book which 
can so fetter the intellect and retard the 
moral and spiritual development of the race. 
Interpreted as the fallible utterance of men, 
it is still profitable for teaching, for reproof, 
for correction, and for instruction in right- 
eousness. 

[79] 



And as he was praying the fashion of his counte- 
nance was altered and his raiment became white and 
dazzling. 

Luke IX, 29. 



PRAYER 



ONE cannot read the story of Jesus 
without realizing the strength of the 
moral and spiritual impulse which he brought 
into the world. One cannot analyze his per- 
sonality without gaining a new insight into 
the secret of his power. His was primarily 
a life of prayer. The closer he came into 
contact with men, the more frequently he 
sought to enter into communion with God. 
The more strenuous the demands made upon 
his time and strength, the more often he went 
apart to pray. It was during the quiet 
hours which he spent in the wilderness or 
upon the mount that he received the moral 
energy and spiritual power which enabled 
him to sway the multitudes. At such times 
he is said to have been so exalted that face 
and form were alike transfigured. 

It is not surprising that this habit of Jesus 
should have made a profound impression 
upon his disciples. They were familiar with 
• [83] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



the perfunctory prayers of temple and syna- 
gogue, and with the long petitions, stereo- 
typed in form and empty of effect, by which 
religious zealots sought to draw attention to 
themselves upon the street corners, but here 
was a form of grayer which seemed to do 
something. It was capable of reviving one's 
flagging energies, strengthening his purpose 
and sending him back to his work with new 
courage and enthusiasm. Can we wonder 
that they desired to share the privilege ? Or 
that, upon one occasion, they became suffi- 
ciently emboldened to exclaim, "Lord, teach 
us to pray." 

The prayer which was given in response 
to this request has become a classic among 
liturgical utterances. Its simplicity, its at- 
mosphere of trust, its unselfish spirit, all 
combine to give it a permanent place in the 
liturgies of the church. And yet it is doubt- 
ful if Jesus intended to establish a fixed 
form. He little thought that the words that 
he uttered would be repeated today as an al- 
most universal petition among Christian peo- 
ple. He sought to give his disciples a model 

[84] 



PRAYER 



which they might follow in formulating their 
own prayers. But the model proved to be 
so chaste and beautiful that it was treasured, 
almost word for word, by the disciples, pre- 
served by two of the gospel writers, and re- 
mains today one of the most widely recog- 
nized bonds of Christian fellowship. Catho- 
lic and Protestant, orthodox and heterodox, 
can unite in this series of simple petitions ad- 
dressed to their Father who is in Heaven. 

Such an experience gives rise to the ques- 
tion, what is prayer? What is it that has 
given it its unique place in the religions of the 
world? Whatever differences we may rec- 
ognize between them, all are one in their 
emphasis upon the importance of this habit. 
It must have a peculiar purpose in order to 
account for its peculiar power. Prayer may 
be defined as the response of the soul to its 
spiritual environment. It is the expression 
of a desire to come into touch with a Power 
higher and holier than ourselves. Every 
soul that is at all sensitive to spiritual reali- 
ties becomes conscious sooner or later of 
great spiritual forces which surround us on 

[85] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



every hand and hold us continually in their 
embrace. We flatter ourselves that we are 
free, that we shape and control our own 
destinies, and we sing with enthusiasm, 

"I am the master of my fate, 
I am the captain of my soul." 

In the last analysis, however, we are all crea- 
tures of destiny. The consciousness of our 
complete dependence upon God is the source 
of our power. "It is he that hath made us, 
and not we ourselves." In spite of our ap- 
parent freedom and self-direction, we know 
that above us and within us and around us 
there is a Power over which we have no con- 
trol and which is constantly influencing our 
lives for either good or ill. 

From time immemorial men have sought 
to come into conscious relationship with that 
power. They have sought to establish some 
kind of fellowship between themselves and 
their moral and spiritual environment. Be- 
ing human and obliged to think in human 
terms, they have resorted to methods similar 
to those which they are accustomed to use in 

[86] 



PRAYER 



communicating with one another. Some- 
times the attempt has taken the form of 
spoken petition and adoration and in this 
way have grown up the great prayers of the 
ages, dating from specific periods and yet 
voicing the longings and aspirations of all 
time. At other times it has resorted to a 
sort of sign language, seeking to express it- 
self in postures and gestures, in ritual and 
ceremonial. Occasionally it has ignored 
both of these methods and contented itself 
with silent communion or unspoken aspira- 
tion, with no attempt at outward expression. 
In each case, however, it has been prayer, 
and wherever it has proceeded from a sincere 
motive, an earnest desire to bring the finite 
soul into touch with the great Over-soul, it 
has been true prayer. 

Scarcely less conspicuous than the natural- 
ness and universality of these attempts to 
establish conscious relationship with some 
higher power has been their diversity. The 
attempts have been high or low, worthy or 
unworthy, according to one's conception of 
the nature of this higher power. Men have 

[87] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



prayed to sticks and stones regarded as 
fetishes or fashioned into idols. They have 
prayed to the sun and moon and stars and 
to almost every object of nature. They 
have prayed to animals and to other men as 
well as to the spirits of departed ancestors 
and to the multitudinous variety of gods. 
They have looked beyond these objects of 
worship to the power which was manifest in 
and through them and have sought to come 
into right relations with that power. It is 
a far cry from the savage praying to his 
war-god to give him victory over his enemies 
to the publican in the temple praying, "God 
be merciful to me, a sinner," or to the psalm- 
ist crying, "Lord, create in me a clean heart 
and renew within me a right spirit." The 
gulf is even wider between the imprecatory 
psalms of the Old Testament and Jesus' 
prayer in the New, "Father, forgive them, 
for they know not what they do." And yet 
these represent varying stages in the evolu- 
tion of the attempt to give expression to one 
of the most fundamental instincts of the hu- 
man soul. 

[88] 



PRAYER 

The most casual observer must be aware 
that there has been a decline in the habit of 
prayer. There are many things which have 
contributed to this decline. The larger 
thought of God has led many to shrink from 
making any personal demands upon his 
favor. The belief in law as unfailing and 
immutable has made many of the ancient 
petitions obsolete. Why agonize in spirit if 
we cannot hope that, for us, aught of good 
or ill may be diverted from its appointed 
path? Why wrestle with the Almighty if he 
is unable to alter the workings of a single 
law that he has ordained? Furthermore the 
dread of all pious pretense and an instinc- 
tive feeling of delicacy have made it increas- 
ingly difficult for men to expose the spiritual 
workings of their souls to the gaze of the 
unsympathetic and even scornful as was the 
custom among the participants in the old- 
fashioned prayer meeting. To this may be 
added the fact that the restlessness and fever 
of our modern way of living tend to diminish 
the opportunity for a quiet hour in which to 
commune with the Father in spirit and in 

[89] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



truth. And yet it would be a mistake to call 
this a prayerless age. It is not that men do 
not pray but that they do not find it as easy 
to give outward expression to their prayers. 
The ease and naturalness with which some 
great emergency brings an involuntary 
prayer to the lips, so that men pray who 
never prayed before, proves how close to the 
surface the prayerful mood lies. 

Thus the present decline in the habit of 
prayer is largely a decline in outward ex- 
pression. The prayerful mood remains but 
we know not how to pray as we ought. Pub- 
lic prayer, as it prevails in our churches and 
at certain public functions, has been safe- 
guarded by tradition and custom, but not so 
private prayer. It is a fair question how 
long public prayer can survive if the habit of 
private prayer is abandoned. We speak of 
common prayer, but prayer is not common 
unless it voices the aspirations and longings 
of those who are present and awakens a re- 
sponse in their hearts. Public prayer is not 
a performance to be watched or heard; it is 
an experience to be shared. And how can it 

[90] 



PRAYER 

be shared unless all are in the prayerful 
mood? Without a certain degree of pre- 
paredness common prayer becomes an impos- 
sibility. The mind is occupied with irrele- 
vant matters. It lacks that perfect abandon 
which is a prerequisite. One purpose of 
what has come to be called the introductory 
service is to induce the prayerful mood. 
We have made the mistake of thinking of 
it as introductory to the sermon. It is not. 
It is introductory to the prayer. Organ pre- 
lude, anthem, hymn, scripture reading, all 
have a common aim, to bring about this 
spiritual preparedness without which com- 
mon prayer becomes a misnomer. They 
have their natural climax in the words, 
"Let us pray/' The impression that some 
churches are more reverential than others is 
due in no small degree to the fact that in 
them the people come in promptly, sit down 
quietly, and join in a common service of wor- 
ship; while in others the people straggle in 
one by one, and thoughtlessly interrupt the 
devotions of others by nodding to one an- 
other or whispering or indulging in equally 

[91] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



reprehensible forms of social intercourse. 
It may be that none of these constitutes re- 
ligion ; but they create the atmosphere which 
is favorable to the prayerful mood and con- 
sequently to the religious life. 

Now the remedy for unpreparedness is 
preparedness. The best way to attain the 
prayerful mood on Sunday is to accustom 
oneself to it on other days of the week. We 
speak of God as the gracious giver of every 
good and perfect gift. Should we allow one 
day to go by without acknowledging our 
indebtedness? The soul that does not de- 
vote a portion of each day to communion 
with the things of the spirit will find it in- 
creasingly difficult to put itself into an at- 
titude of communion on Sunday. The oc- 
casional prayer, the instinctive turning to 
God at the great crises of life, can never be 
wholly abandoned. But what of the insti- 
tution of family worship ? Nothing has been 
invented which has done more to lift men into 
the atmosphere of the spirit and to give them 
an intimate sense of the presence and the 
power of God than this one institution. The 

[92] 



PRAYER 



elaborate morning prayers of a generation 
or more ago have gone beyond recall. But 
the increasing number of families in which 
the custom is to begin the day by reading 
some appropriate passage of scripture or 
some inspiring bit of verse and then uniting 
in the Lord's prayer is proof that the insti- 
tution of family worship is based upon the 
recognition of a spiritual need which the oc- 
casional public prayer cannot satisfy. It 
not only serves to pitch the life of each new 
day at its proper level, but it affords an op- 
portunity for simple, unostentatious reli- 
gious expression and so ministers to soul 
growth. Thus to be helpful, prayer must 
be habitual. To receive the greatest benefit 
from public prayer, one must accustom one- 
self to private prayer. It may be the repe- 
tition of some familiar petition around the 
family altar, or the quiet talk with God in 
the seclusion of one's own closet, but in either 
case it reenforces the conviction that we are 
not pilgrims or strangers but children of the 
household of God. 

And now what of the answer to prayer? 
[93] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 

If we remember that the primary object of 
prayer is not petition but communion we 
shall not be seriously concerned about the 
answer. Some prayers ought not to be an- 
swered. To attempt to dictate the blessings 
which God shall bestow, is impiety. To 
pray that for us the laws of the universe may 
be set aside, is impertinence. To ask for 
the things we think we ought to ask for 
rather than for the things we really desire 
and for the attainment of which we are exert- 
ing every effort, is hypocrisy. To ask for 
specific blessings and then refrain from all 
personal endeavor, trusting that the Lord 
will provide, is mockery. Such prayers are 
never answered. But when we make our 
prayer the vehicle for expressing our highest 
aspirations and desires, and then add to our 
prayer earnest and consecrated effort, it 
must bring results. The answer may not 
be the one for which we looked. Our prayer 
may be answered in a larger sense than we 
had dreamed. Moses prayed that he might 
enter the land of promise. Instead he was 
given the power to relinquish his work into 

[94] 



PRAYER 

other hands confident that in the end God's 
purposes would be fulfilled. Jesus prayed 
that the cup might pass from him. Instead 
he was given the strength to drain it to the 
dregs and to say, "Thy will, not mine, be 
done." 

Such prayer can never pass away. In its 
lowest and simplest form it will always re- 
main petition, asking for the things we most 
desire and yet knowing all the while that 
God will grant only such blessings as are 
most expedient for us. In another and 
higher form it will become aspiration and 
meditation, the yearning for a higher lif e and 
the desire that we may be given the strength 
to live it. But in its last and highest form 
prayer will always be communion, the blend- 
ing of the human and the divine, the com- 
plete identification of our wills with the will 
of God, the consciousness that we are stand- 
ing in his presence and that our souls are 
"in tune with the infinite." Such prayer is 
its own answer and its own sufficient re- 
ward. 



[95] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



"More things are wrought by prayer 

Than this world dreams of; wherefore let thy voice 

Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 

For what are men better than sheep or goats 

That nourish a blind life within the brain 

If, knowing God, they lift not hands in prayer ?" 



[96] 



God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the 
world but that the world through him might be saved. 

John III, 17. 



SALVATION 



A FEW years ago the editor of the Hib- 
bert Journal sought to indicate the 
probable effects of the great war upon reli- 
gion. He stated that there had always been 
two rival systems of theology, based upon 
two diverse interpretations of the world and 
of human life. Wherever the world has 
been regarded as evil and human life un- 
worthy, religion has expressed itself as a 
longing for salvation, a yearning on the part 
of the individual for redemption from the 
world and from self. Wherever the world 
has been regarded as good and human life a 
boon, religion has expressed itself as an ef- 
fort after moral excellence, an attempt on the 
part of the individual to play his part in the 
world and to make some worth while con- 
tribution to it. Dr. Jacks predicted that 
which of these two theories should be more 
popular after the war would depend upon 
how the human mind should react in the 

[99] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



presence of this world catastrophe. If it 
leads men to despair of the world and of hu- 
man civilization, then the religion of salva- 
tion will receive an enormous impetus. But 
if it strengthens the conviction that present 
evil may result in ultimate good, that God 
will yet make the wrath of man to praise him 
while the remainder of wrath he will restrain, 
then the outlook for the religion of moral 
excellence will be most encouraging. 

The war is ended, and yet the same uncer- 
tainty prevails today. It is too early to say 
whether the war has resulted in the strength- 
ening of the claims of the old theology or in 
the renewal of the demand for a more liberal 
and a more rational interpretation of reli- 
gion. Unitarians, however, continue to 
identify themselves with the religion of moral 
excellence. They still dare to have faith in 
a good God and in a good world and in the 
progress of mankind upward and onward 
forever, and this faith determines their at- 
titude toward the traditional doctrine of sal- 
vation. It dictates their conception of the 
life from which they wish to be saved and 
[100] 



SALVATION 



the life into which they wish to be delivered. 

The problem of salvation cannot be dis- 
sociated from that of human sinfulness. 
Nowhere does the old theology differ more 
radically from the new. In one, sin is an 
inheritance from the past; in the other it is 
an achievement of the present. One bases 
it upon the ancient doctrine of imputed 
righteousness and imputed guilt; the other 
upon the modern conception of human free- 
dom and responsibility. According to one, 
men are sinners because of another's trans- 
gression and they can be saved only by an- 
other's righteousness ; according to the other, 
it is one's own act which determines the na- 
ture of his offense and the measure of his 
responsibility. And as these two theories 
differ in their conception of sin, so also they 
differ in their interpretation of the nature of 
punishment. With one, it involves endless 
suffering in an eternal hell, a punishment 
which is purely vindictive in character ; with 
the other, it involves the cumulative effect of 
the penalties which every breach of the moral 
law brings in its wake, penalties which 
[101] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



are wholly remedial. Endless punishment 
would defeat its own purpose. It would 
make forever impossible the reclamation of 
the sinner. It would signify that finite hu- 
man creatures could revolt against the in- 
finite God and continue that revolt through- 
out eternity in spite of the restraints of Al- 
mighty Power and the constraints of Al- 
mighty Love. Thus the traditional hell 
would be a perpetual monument to a de- 
feated God. It would be destructive of all 
religious faith. As long as men remain im- 
perfect, they will continue to sin, each sin 
will bring its inevitable penalty, and these 
penalties will increase in intensity until, 
through their cumulative effect, every hu- 
man soul is brought into right relations with 
God. It may take a year or it may take a 
millennium, but its goal is assured. A good 
God cannot will that any of his children shall 
perish. If he wills that all shall have ever- 
lasting life, then he will find some way to 
accomplish his purpose. Otherwise he is not 
infinite. He is not God. To those who af- 
firm that such a conception of sin and its 
[102] 



SALVATION 

punishment cuts the nerve of all moral en- 
deavor, and that "if you destroy the fear of 
hell in the minds of men you will create a 
hell on earth, v it can be rejoined that just 
in proportion as the world has grown morally 
better, belief in a literal hell has declined. 
The finest types of human character are 
found among those who have long since 
abandoned this archaic belief. It is doubt- 
ful if any human being has ever been kept 
back from presumptuous sin by the picture 
of a lurid hell at the end of every sinner's 
life. Our prisons and reformatories are 
filled with those who have had the advantage 
of whatever deterrent effect the traditional 
doctrine may have been able to exert. 

It is against the background of human sin- 
fulness that we must formulate our concep- 
tion of salvation. Its fundamental meaning 
may be determined by considering the deriv- 
ation of the word. It comes from the Latin 
"salvus," which means wholeness, or health. 
The saved life is the whole life, the life that 
is characterized by moral sanity and spirit- 
ual health. Because of this, every saved 
[103] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



man becomes a saviour, one who saves others. 
If he does not become such a saviour, he 
needs to beware lest he himself come short of 
salvation. 

"Heaven's gates are shut to him who comes alone; 
Save thou a soul, and it shall save thine own." 

Such a conception is the polar opposite of 
the traditional interpretation. According 
to that, there has never been but one saviour. 
To Jesus, and to him alone, this title can 
be applied. And the salvation which he 
wrought was determined by the traditional 
conception of human needs. The first man 
was created not only innocent, but perfect. 
He was placed in a beautiful garden and 
provided with everything which he might 
need for his enjoyment or his use. There 
he might have remained had he not disobeyed 
the divine command. Through that primal 
act of disobedience he not only fell from 
grace, and lost the consciousness of the di- 
vine approval, but he made it possible for 
sin and death to enter the world and become 
a part of the inheritance of the race. The 
[104] 



SALVATION 

function of Jesus, according to the tradi- 
tional scheme of salvation, is to save men 
from this inherited guilt. The church has 
sanctioned many different explanations of 
how this salvation is to be accomplished, but 
that Jesus' death upon the cross atoned for 
human sinfulness and made possible the 
forgiveness of God is fundamental to them 
all. For more than twelve centuries the 
great question among Christian people was 
"What shall I do to be saved?" And the 
answer was "Submit yourself to the author- 
ity of the church. It alone possesses the 
kingdom of Heaven and therefore it alone 
can assure one of salvation." Thus the 
world was regarded as a doomed vessel, the 
church was a sort of life raft moored along- 
side, and the cry that went up from Christian 
leaders was "Sauve qui pent/' The situa- 
tion was not even relieved by the rule of 
"Women and children first." Men forgot 
their duty to their fellows in their mad desire 
to achieve safety for themselves. 

The Protestant reformation destroyed the 
Roman monopoly of the straight gate and 
[105] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



the narrow way by providing other gates 
and other ways but they were equally 
straight and equally narrow. In place of 
the Roman Catholic submission to ecclesias- 
tical authority as the sole condition of salva- 
tion, it promulgated a variety of conditions. 
With Luther it was justification by faith; 
with Calvin, election and f oreordination ; 
with Arminius, the abounding grace of God. 
And all of these, Catholicism, Lutheranism, 
Calvinism and Arminianism, claimed to be 
founded upon the teachings of one whose 
constant solicitude was not how he might 
save himself but how he might serve others, 
not how he might get to heaven bye and bye, 
but how he could hasten the coming of the 
kingdom of Heaven here and now. Can we 
wonder that men came to distrust this whole 
scheme of salvation as an insult to God and 
an outrage upon humanity? They asked, 

"Is selfishness, — for time a sin, — 

Stretched out unto eternity, celestial prudence?" 

Only in a self-centred world, one in which 
everything is ordered with special reference 
[106] 



SALVATION 

to human needs and desires, could the tradi- 
tional view of salvation find a congenial at- 
mosphere. In a world which is God-centred 
it cannot long endure. Unitarians believe 
that instead of falling to our present state 
from a higher level of innocence and perfec- 
tion, humanity has been slowly rising 
through countless ages of evolution and de- 
velopment. The process is still far from 
complete. With the advance in knowledge 
and the consequent quickening of our ethical 
perception, we can no longer regard personal 
salvation as the ultimate goal of human en- 
deavor. We are less concerned about our 
destiny in another world than about our 
duties in this. And there is a growing con- 
viction among all thinking people that if we 
will but attend to the duties, God will pro- 
vide the destiny. If we can make our lives 
of service to the world, he will arrange for 
their ultimate preservation. For us the 
question is not "How shall I be saved?" but 
"How can I make myself worth saving?" 
And the answer is, only by a life of love and 
service, 

[107] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 

And what is the chief obstacle to this life 
of service? It is our inherent selfishness. 
This is the primal source of almost all of the 
sins of humanity, the spirit which leads us 
to magnify self and to seek our own rather 
than our neighbor's good. It is a spirit 
which is as old as humanity. It has given us 
a self-centred universe, a self-centred the- 
ology, and a self-centred interpretation of 
life and duty. And it is from this that we 
must seek salvation. Not from the penal- 
ties for our sins, for these are remedial in 
nature and salutary in effect, but from sin 
itself and its root-source, selfishness. And 
it is for this that we look to Jesus. He has 
pointed out the way of escape. "Whosoever 
would save his life, shall lose it; but whoso- 
ever would lose his life for my sake, shall 
find it." The effort after personal salva- 
tion defeats itself. It is inherently selfish 
and selfishness can never be the centre of the 
religious life. As Whittier has said: "Hope 
not the cure of sin till self is dead." It is 
only by renouncing the life of self that the 
higher life is found. It is only by "forget- 
[108] 



SALVATION 



ting it in love's service." The great war 
taught us that there are ideal values for 
which men will sacrifice their comfort and 
ease and even life itself. To save one's life 
from all hardship and discomfort and priva- 
tion is to lose everything that makes it worth 
living; while to lose one's life in the service 
of some great and worthy cause is to find it 
again in ever greater abundance. 

Thus we continue to look to Jesus as a 
world-saviour. He saves men, not by his 
death, but by his life. When asked that the 
chief places in the kingdom might be re- 
served for two of his disciples, he replied 
that it was not in his power to grant such a 
request. These places were for those for 
whom they had been prepared from the foun- 
dation of the world, those who had demon- 
strated their fitness for them by long and 
faithful service. There was to be no spoils 
system, no favoritism, in the kingdom of 
God. This lesson was not lost upon the dis- 
ciples. With them, also, service, good 
works, brotherly love, Christian kindness, 
became the characteristics of the followers 
[109] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



of Jesus. The New Testament knows 
nothing of any faith which is not born of 
love and attested by good works. When 
Paul's disciples sought to pervert his teach- 
ings and asserted that one could be saved by 
faith independent of good works, St. James 
rebuked them with this challenge: "Show 
me thy faith apart from thy works and I, by 
my works, will show thee my faith." For 
"faith without works is dead." A saving 
faith is not the acceptance of a body of opin- 
ions about God and Christ and their relations 
to one another and to the world; it is an at- 
titude of confidence and love and trust 
toward God as the great all-father and 
toward Jesus as the supreme revealer of that 
God to men. To those who share this faith 
religion is no longer a means of personal 
salvation; it is a means of social service. 
The church is no longer an ark of safety; 
it is an institution through which we seek to 
organize the life of God as it manifests it- 
self in the souls of men and to enlist it in 
the service of the world. Under such condi- 
tions the desire for salvation becomes at once 
[110] 



SALVATION 



honest and honorable. The means may be 
personal, but the motive and the end are 
both alike social. It is deliverance from the 
sin of selfishness and from all that would 
deaden the conscience or pervert the will. 
Such deliverance is not achieved through 
faith but through character. It is not pur- 
chased for us by another's death; it is some- 
thing which we must work out for ourselves, 
always with fear and trembling lest we prove 
insufficient for the task, and yet always with 
the assurance that in every effort to make 
our lives of service to the world, it is God 
who works in us both to will and to do his 
good pleasure. 



cm] 



Eye hath not seen^ nor ear heard^ neither have 
entered into the heart of man the things which God 
hath prepared for them that love him. 

1 Corinthians II, 9. 



THE FUTURE LIFE 



ONE of the most absorbing questions 
which have baffled and perplexed the 
human mind throughout the ages has been 
as to the nature of that life eternal which 
has been the substance of the hopes and 
dreams of devout men and women. What 
is the secret of the life immortal? How 
shall we solve the mystery which awaits us 
there beyond death? Unfortunately, some 
of our most cherished beliefs are incapable 
of either proof or disproof. We are obliged 
to content ourselves with a reasonable prob- 
ability. Such is our faith in a future life. 
As Tennyson has said : 

"Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no, 
Nor yet that thou art mortal — 
For nothing worth proving can be proven, 
Nor yet disproven." 



The Unitarian belief in immortality isi 
simply the inevitable corollary of their con- 
[115] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



ception of life itself. If life is eternally pro- 
gressive, progress upwards and onwards 
forever, then death must be but an incident 
in that endlessly progressive life. 

There are two tilings which are impressed 
upon us whenever we attempt to solve the 
mystery which lies beyond the grave. One 
is the recognition of the insuperable obstacles 
by which every such attempt is beset. For 
centuries men have sought to peer within the 
veil. And with what result? The scenes 
and events of the life immortal remain 
shrouded in impenetrable mystery. No-one 
has yet returned from that mysterious realm 
to gratify our curiosity. Communications 
which purport to come from the friends that 
have gone before, although vouched for by 
Sir Oliver Lodge and others, are couched in 
the language of today and tell us little that 
is not already present in our own or another's 
consciousness. It cannot be affirmed that 
such communications are impossible. No 
human being is sufficiently well informed to 
make such an assertion. What we can say 
is that thus far these alleged communications 
[116] 



THE FUTURE LIFE 

have been singularly disappointing. May it 
not be that there is infinite wisdom underly- 
ing this apparent inscrutability of the be- 
yond? May it not be a beneficent uncer- 
tainty? If it were possible to make voyages 
of discovery into that other world and to 
chart its mysteries, could we bear to do any- 
thing else? If we knew that we could enter 
into communication with the friends who 
have gone before, should we not be forever 
besieging the portals of that other world for 
such communications ? And would this not 
lead to the utter abandonment of the inter- 
ests and activities of the life that now 
is? One cannot escape the conviction that 
if God had intended that we should know 
the details of that life he would have made 
it easier for them to be ascertained. If he 
has not made it easier for us, may it not be 
because he does not wish to have the inter- 
ests of this life overshadowed by the dis- 
tractions of the next? We must live our 
lives "One world at a time." "Otherwise," 
as Kant has said, "God and eternity, with 
their infinite majesty, would stand cease- 
[117] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



lessly before our eyes." We could think of 
nothing else. It may be that the benefi- 
cence of this present life is attested by what 
is denied quite as much as by what is given. 

A second impression made upon us by the 
attempts to fathom the secrets of that other 
life is that the reality must surpass anything 
that the mind can formulate or the imagina- 
tion conceive. In the words of Isaiah, which 
have their echo in St. Paul, " Since the begin- 
ning of the world, men have not heard, nor 
perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye 
seen, — what God hath prepared for him that 
waiteth upon him." How pathetic have 
been the attempts of devout men to behold 
the invisible and to portray the indescribable. 
The Indian with his happy hunting ground, 
the Goth with his Valhalla of feasting and 
fighting, the Oriental with his dream of an- 
nihilation or absorption and the Christian 
with his vision of a city with walls of jasper, 
gates of pearl and streets of gold, all attest 
the inability of the human imagination to 
grasp the reality of that other life. We look 
up from these various pictures, with their 
[118] 



THE FUTURE LIFE 



material crudity and spiritual poverty, with 
the conviction that that life must be infinitely 
grander than this or God's work has resulted 
in an anti-climax. In the words of Sir 
Oliver Lodge: "I will not believe that it is 
given to man to have thoughts nobler or 
loftier than the real truth of things." 

Let us turn from the vision to the reality. 
If, as we believe, all worlds are God's worlds 
and all life is one, then we must be already 
living the eternal life. As Dr. Fosdick has 
said, "If man is immortal at all, he is immor- 
tal now." Eternal life is not a possession 
conferred at death; it is a present endow- 
ment. This is the conviction which is grad- 
ually taking possession of the minds of 
thinking people. They are giving less 
thought to what is to become of them after 
death and more to what is happening to 
them here and now. What kind of a life 
are we actually living today? What sort of 
characters are we forming in the midst of our 
daily activities? Are we living so as to 
make it worth while for God to permit us to 
live forever? If so, can we doubt that he 
[119] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



will make it possible for us to live forever? 
These are the questions which men are pon- 
dering even though they may shrink from 
giving expression to their hopes and fears. 
What they are not always conscious of is 
that this comes nearer to the thought of Jesus 
than much that has passed as the teaching of 
the church. When the young man came to 
him and asked, "What good thing shall I 
do that I may have eternal life?" he was not 
contemplating impending death. He was 
never more alive. And when Jesus an- 
swered, "If thou w r ouldst enter into life, keep 
the commandments," he also was thinking 
of life, not death. To him, entering upon 
life was synonymous with life eternal. It 
was something that could be experienced 
here and now, not something for which we 
must wait until we have shuffled off this mor- 
tal coil. According to Jesus, until one be- 
comes conscious of the eternal character of 
this present life, he has not begun to live. 
"He that heareth my word and believeth on 
him that sent me hath (already) everlasting 
life." Only through this faith in the end- 
[120] 



THE FUTURE LIFE 



less character of the life we are now living 
can we claim the victory over death and the 
grave. 

Such a faith is a matter of conviction 
rather than of proof. It is the result of ac- 
tual experience rather than of logical deduc- 
tion. One might prove that life survives 
death without proving that it is eternal. It 
might survive for a time and then fade away. 
One might prove that the human soul is in- 
destructible without proving that the con- 
sciousness of personal identity will be pre- 
served. The soul may be reabsorbed into 
the source whence it came. One might 
prove that Jesus arose from the dead and 
ascended bodily into heaven without prov- 
ing that a similar destiny awaits mankind. 
Such an experience would mark him as a 
unique personality, and as such he would 
naturally experience a unique destiny. But 
one cannot demonstrate the real quality of 
the life that we are living without proving 
its eternal character. The disciples be- 
came conscious of the power of the endless 
life in Jesus and they refused to believe that 
[121] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



death could have dominion over him. It is 
the consciousness of this same deathless 
quality in the lives of those we know best and 
love most which assures us that, for them 
also, death cannot be the end. But if for 
them, why not for all? For death 

"Can only take away the mortal breath; 

And life^ commencing here, 

Is but the prelude to its full career." 

If we would assure ourselves of the power 
of this faith, we must observe its effects upon 
the lives of those who have cherished it. 
Their name is legion, for it has been the in- 
spiration of the saints and martyrs of every 
age and race. Nowhere do we find it more 
clearly exhibited than in the life of the great 
apostle. Although he was not one of the 
original disciples and had been deprived of 
the privilege of walking with Jesus and talk- 
ing with him during his brief ministry, he 
came nearer to his thought than any of 
the chosen twelve. Furthermore his letters 
were written prior to the earliest of the gos- 
pel narratives and therefore before the myths 
[122] 



THE FUTURE LIFE 



and legends which came to be associated with 
Jesus had gained wide acceptance. He 
knew nothing of the virgin birth and the 
bodily resurrection, and yet for him Jesus 
was not dead, but alive forevermore. There 
is no New Testament writer whose testimony 
is given more emphatically or more consist- 
ently in favor of this power of the endless 
life. 

The first effect of this faith was to make 
St. Paul utterly indifferent to all earthly 
vicissitudes. As long as he could carry on 
the work to which he had dedicated himself, 
he cared nothing about the persecution and 
suffering to which he was subjected. They 
were evidence that he had been permitted 
to share the tribulations of the Master and 
might expect, therefore, to share his glory. 
He might suffer, but he must not sin. He 
might be beaten and imprisoned and endure 
all manner of evil, but he must not renounce 
the cause of Christ and so crucify him afresh. 
For, as he wrote to the Roman church, "The 
wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is 
eternal life." 

[123] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



A second effect of this same faith was 
Paul's contempt for death and all its attend- 
ant evils. Writing to his friends in the 
Philippian church he states that it matters 
not to him whether he live or die, if so be 
Christ is magnified in his body, "for to live 
is Christ, to die is gain." To the Corinthians 
he writes: "For we are confident, willing 
rather to be absent from the body and to be 
present with the Lord." At times his atti- 
tude is that of mingled challenge and exulta- 
tion as in the familiar cry, "O death, where 
is thy sting; O grave, where is thy victory?" 
Everywhere there is the same sublime disre- 
gard, fearing neither death nor life, nor 
things present nor things to come, if only he 
remained obedient to the heavenly vision. 

This faith, while conspicuous in the great 
apostle, was not peculiar to him. It has mani- 
fested its power in all ages. We witness the 
same heroic spirit asserting itself again and 
again during those terrible days when the 
church was prostrate under the heel of a 
Domitian or a Nero. There is something to 
be reckoned with in a faith which takes rich 
[124] 



THE FUTURE LIFE 

and poor, master and slave, patrician and 
peasant, and transforms all alike into heroes 
and martyrs. They might renounce their 
property but they would not renounce their 
religion. They might be deprived of their 
liberty but they could not be deprived of 
their faith. They went into the arena with 
hymns of praise upon their lips. They were 
torn by wild beasts and mangled by scarcely 
less brutal gladiators, and yet they retained 
their faith that their affliction, which endured 
but for a moment, would work for them a far 
more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 
Persecution might destroy the body ; it could 
not destroy the soul. And when, at last, 
they should be absent from the body, they 
would be at home with their Lord. 

If, at times, this faith seems wholly absent 
from the world of today, it is not because it 
has lost its power but because men have lost 
their grip upon it or abandoned it altogether. 
Those who heed the apostolic injunction and 
lay hold upon life eternal find that it has 
lost none of its old-time efficacy. Make it 
a this world reality, not a next world expec- 
[125] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



tation, and all fear of death will be swallowed 
up in the consciousness of life. Such a faith 
does not bid us court death, but live each day 
as though we knew that we were to live for- 
ever. It does not bid us renounce our 
worldly possessions, but use them as means 
to the attainment of a higher life. It does 
not bid us go into the arena and fight with 
beasts in order to prove our faith, but it bids 
us take our stand as immortal souls in the 
midst of the arena of life and to wage an 
eternal warfare against everything that 
would drag us down to the brute level. 
Without this faith, we might regard this 
earthly life as a sort of pleasure trip, pro- 
longed for twenty or forty or seventy years, 
after which we go hence to be no more. 
Under such conditions it would be the part of 
wisdom to crowd it with creature comforts 
and bodily satisfactions. We should eat, 
drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. 
But sustained and strengthened by this faith, 
believing that we are not pilgrims or stran- 
gers but children of the household of God, life 
becomes real and earnest and the grave is no 
[126] 



THE FUTURE LIFE 



longer the goal. We experience a complete 
trans valuation of values. We realize that 
wealth and power are temporal; they will be 
left behind. Character is eternal; it alone 
endures. Creature comforts are fleeting 
and transitory; they will pass away. The 
things of the spirit are permanent ; they can 
never fade. Even death itself is temporal. 
It is simply a door, opening into another and 
larger room in the father's house, and life 
becomes richer and more beautiful as we 
journey through the many mansions which 
he hath prepared for those that love him. 

This has been well called "practicing im- 
mortality." Those who have learned to live 
their lives amid the seen and the temporal 
in the spirit of one whose soul has been 
touched by the unseen and the eternal, find 
that this faith has lost none of its power. 
It is capable of transforming the lives of 
men today just as it transformed the lives 
of Jesus and Paul and the holy men of old. 
Working day by day in the light of an end- 
less life, we become builders for eternity. 
The apparent loss of spiritual energy, the 
[127] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



seeming discrepancy between the world's ef- 
fort and its actual achievement, the manifest 
disparity between virtue and happiness, or 
wickedness and misery, the blasted hopes, 
the disappointed ambitions, the shattered af- 
fections, all of which are so apparent when- 
ever we attempt to view this life as an end in 
itself, disappear at once when we learn to 
view it as part of a larger whole. In that 
larger life the lost spiritual power is re- 
gained, the world processes come to an ade- 
quate fruition, the justice of the world is 
vindicated and the broken arcs of our little 
lives come to their perfect round. As 
Browning says : 

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good 

shall exist, 
Not its semblance, but itself — 

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour." 

It requires no argument to prove that a 
life lived in this way, "under the aspect of 
eternity," cannot fail to give satisfaction. 
In the words of Aristotle: "Live as nearly 
as you can the immortal life and it will prove 
[128] 



THE FUTURE LIFE 



itself. Live the kind of life you ought to 
live if you are to live forever and all your 
doubts will disappear." Live it for a single 
day and it will be abundantly worth while. 
Live it for any number of days and it will 
bring with it a strength of character, a moral 
courage, a spiritual peace which the world 
can neither give nor take away. 



[129] 



CONCLUSION 



ARE UNITARIANS EVANGELICAL? 

THE question with which we began — 
Who are the Unitarians?: — is now an- 
swered. We have considered their origin, 
their history and their beliefs. It has been 
demonstrated that a creedless church is not 
necessarily a faithless church. It could be 
demonstrated just as easily that this free 
faith has ever articulated itself in terms of 
upright life and noble character. Call the 
roll of the good and the great among the men 
and women of America and one will be sur- 
prised to find how many of them have be- 
longed to the Unitarian church. A church 
which has numbered among its adherents 
William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edward Everett 
Hale, and which still counts among its most 
devoted members Charles W. Eliot and 
William Howard Taft cannot be ignored. 
Its constituency must be weighed rather than 
counted. We can say without boasting, for 
[130] 



CONCLUSION 



it is admitted by those who love us least, 
that nowhere in any community can one find 
a group of men and women more renowned 
for breadth of mind, strength of will and in- 
tegrity of character, than those who have as- 
sociated themselves together for the purpose 
of organizing a Unitarian church. 

For more than a century it has been the 
privilege of these churches to mediate be- 
tween an unintelligent faith and an irrelig- 
ious culture. They have demonstrated that 
men can be religious without being supersti- 
tious and liberal without being irreverent. 
This has been a task for strong men, for 
self-reliant men, for men who have dared to 
do their own thinking and to abide by the 
consequences of their own thought. This 
may explain, even if it does not justify, what 
is often an occasion for concern among lib- 
eral Christians, — the relatively small number 
of liberal churches. It is lamented that it is 
not a popular faith, that it does not appeal 
to the multitudes. Since when has truth 
been determined by majorities or the right 
by popular vote? Ours is a pioneer move- 
[131] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 



ment. Our mission has been to blaze the 
trail over which others now walk in perfect 
security. When we become popular we 
shall have ceased to be pioneers. 

Scarcely less common among the miscon- 
ceptions of Unitarianism is the statement 
that it is an easy faith. On the contrary it 
is the hardest of the hard. It dares to dis- 
pense with the helps upon which other 
churches place so much reliance. It is 
harder to think for oneself than to have one's 
thinking done by pope or presbyter or priest. 
It is harder to formulate one's own belief 
than to accept a creed formulated by synod 
or council or church. It is harder to deter- 
mine for oneself what is right and then to do 
it at whatever cost than to conform to some 
external standard of conduct. And it is a 
thousandfold harder to face the inevitable 
and unescapable penalties for wrong-doing 
than to have those penalties remitted through 
faith in the atoning death of an innocent man. 
It is this reliance of the individual upon him- 
self, upon his own reason and conscience and 
will, that makes the Unitarian faith so diffi- 
[132] 



CONCLUSION 



cult to accept and to live up to, and yet it is 
this self-reliance which makes it abundantly 
worth while. 

But is such a faith evangelical? This is 
the question asked by those who are respon- 
sible for the policy of exclusion in religion 
and answered in the negative. Our answer 
will depend upon what we mean by evangel- 
ical. It may mean a message which is liter- 
ally "good news/' or one which is in accord 
with the teachings of Jesus as contained in 
the gospel narratives. 

We know how the traditional scheme of 
salvation, with its wretched story of sin and 
failure and defeat, fares when subjected to 
this twofold test. Is it good news? Can 
one who hears the story for the first time ac- 
cept it as glad tidings of great joy? Is it 
not rather a gospel of despair? Again, is 
it in accord with the teachings of Jesus? 
On the contrary it is in direct opposition to 
those teachings. If Jesus were here today 
and were to be judged by his teachings as 
recorded in the four gospels, he would not be 
eligible to sit in the councils of the so-called 
evangelical churches. 

[133] 



WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 

How is it with the Unitarian message as 
outlined in these pages, — God our Father, 
man our brother, Jesus our moral and spirit- 
ual leader, human life a progress in that 
Christlikeness of character which is salvation, 
and human destiny that same progress con- 
tinued upward and onward forever? If we 
take the word literally, it is certainly evan- 
gelical, for it has brought glad tidings of 
great joy to men in all ages and the world 
over. If we take the derived meaning as 
implying conformity to the teachings of 
Jesus, it is also evangelical, for it is more 
than conformity; it is practical identity. It 
is a fair question whether the Unitarian 
church, (and its sister church, the Universal- 
ist) is not the only church which has a right 
to call itself evangelical; for it is the only 
church which has dared to preserve in all its 
simple beauty the evangel which Jesus pro- 
claimed in far-off Galilee, — the good tidings 
of the coming of the kingdom of God, and 
of man's fitness for citizenship therein. We 
are not ashamed of this gospel of Christ, and 
by our fidelity to it we are willing to be 
judged. 

[134] 



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